How It All Started

Hello there. Welcome to Tech Time: a blog about nerdy stuff, written by the Harvest Engineering Crew.

I’d like to start this off by giving you a quick, cursive picture of how we got here. Bear with me:

Danny and I (we’re co-founders of Harvest) met at Cornell University in 1997, in a class called CS314 (the content of which I can barely recall… something to do with CPUs). We paired up as partners and ended up spending more time designing the final presentation than we did with the actual project. Our professor was visibly confused flipping through the book we delivered. We passed the class. He asked if we could help design the site for his new venture (Ensim). Danny and I became close friends.

It’s been nearly 15 years since Danny and I met. Today, Harvest is 6 years old and there are 22 of us, 9 on the tech team. Here’s a run down on the tech side of things:

  • Danny and I graduated. Met years later to form Iridesco, a design studio.
  • RoR happened. We found Dee Zsombor, a super hacker, who was living in Romania at the time. He’s now in Budapest, Hungary. Still super, still hacking.
  • We built SuprGlu. It got popular. We needed servers, had no money, shut it down.
  • The three of us built Harvest in 2006. Danny and I designed and built the UI, Dee built the entire backend system.
  • Barry Hess joined us in 2007. He started working on Harvest in September, from his home office in Owatonna, MN. Together, the four of us – from NYC, Romania, and Minnesota – built and maintained Harvest for the first two and a half years.
  • In 2009, Doug Fales found us from Livingston, MT. Aside from being a scary good developer, he’s a scary burly hunter.
  • Late 2009, we were having trouble scaling and servers were going wonkers every week. Warwick Poole came to the rescue. He whips our system in shape in between his world-wide golf tours.
  • Patrick Filler joined us in 2010 on account of his excellent Hobby presentation on pizza. We had no idea at the time that he’d become the Chosen One.
  • T.J. Schuck found us in 2011. He’s the best finger dancer of all devs, and he’s the only Rails Developer working out of our NYC office. He works next to me.
  • Joschka Kintscher emailed us out of the blue, from Lemgo, Germany, to see if he can intern at Harvest. We had no internship program, but we brought him in anyway.
  • Evan Walsh just joined us this week. I don’t really know him yet.
  • Ryan will join us next week. I’m going to just include his name here so he won’t feel left out.

There you are. You will hear from these fine people in the coming days. We’re a relatively small tech team, but together we work on a complex and popular web application. Harvest is built on mostly open source software, serving thousands of businesses around the world and around the clock. Our tech team is constantly solving interesting and difficult technical problems, and we’re always experimenting with new technology and building our own tools. We are a curious bunch and always learning, and we have a lot to share on Tech Time.

Thank you for dropping by, and thank you for your time.