Logan Farr's profile

Logan Farr

Engineering leader & solutions architect

Living happily where leadership and software development meet, I can give the best of both worlds. 10 years of experience in software engineering across the entire stack, including DevOps practices, gives me a wealth of technical information to build the best, scalable, most cost-efficient solution for you.

Some career highlights:

Contact info

logan@loganfarr.com
LinkedIn profile
loganfarr

Quick links

I'm self-taught on almost all of my technical skills, and have gone through numerous leadership trainings to hone my management and coaching abilities. I always strive to be better through feedback loops, continuing education, and building my network.

Angela Duckworth writes in her book Grit, "most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy." This sent me on a journey to find my life philosophy, something that gave me drive and passion. Fortunately, it didn't take long to find it.

I help people reach their full potential.

This may be in individual growth, or it may be in the form of a product. This is why I work at the cross-section of engineering and leadership. This is why I am passionate about understanding people, about helping others grow.

As a leader

I work hard to create a team culture that promotes honesty, trust, healthy conflict, and both the growth of the team and the individual. I believe that people are at the heart of everything, and as the most valuable asset a company can have, should be treated with respect and encouragement.

There are many things that make a team great, but there are three that rise to the top, trust, communication, and emotional intelligence. These traits within a team bring out the best in people, resulting in healthy debates and new ideas. Everyone comes from a different background, a different culture, and it is important to ensure that everyone is heard, that everyone is taken seriously.

Things like "healthy conflict" and "emotional intelligence" aren't something easy to learn, they must be experienced and continuously studied. I coach team members through various topics like emotional literacy and mindful living. These skills combined with something I like to call deliberate work*, create an empowered and growing environment.

Favorite reading

Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.

*This term is derived from, "deliberate practice", originally coined by psychologist Anders Ericsson

As an engineer

Technology has always been a love of mine for as long as I can remmeber. Remember in the 90s, when families had a "computer room," where their bulky PC with CRT monitor were stored? I remember as a child I was fascinated with the CD drive. I couldn't figure out how it worked. So, what did little Logan do? I formed Play-Doh into a disk and tried to cram it in the drive to see how the drive interacted with the Play-Doh. (Something about being able to see the striations? 5-year-old logic.) This, of course, ruined the drive, and the mystery eluded me.

I've kept that same spirit of curiosity (albeit, much less destructive) throughout my life. I have honed my learning agility so that I may pick up new frameworks and languages with ease. This allows me to quickly pick something up, and build things that previously were not possible.

Everything I know has been self-taught, and I continue to push the barrier every day.

Languages

TypeScript, Python, C#/.NET Core, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS + LESS/SCSS

Frameworks & tools

AWS (including CDK, SDK, and CLI), Terraform, Node.js, Angular, REST & SOAP APIs, XSS prevention AWS Professional Solutions Architect certified Certificate verification

As a team member

As my peer, or really anytime you're on a team with me, you can expect a few things.

Things you will regularly hear from me

"Is there anything I can do to help you feel less stressed?"
"I would be happy to walk you through it and answer any questions that come up."
"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Can we try reviewing this differently?"

2024 Goals

- [x] Read Team Topologies - [ ] Machine Learning & AI - [x] Read __AI and Machine Learning for Coders__ - [ ] Complete course __Complete Tensorflow 2 and Keras Deep Learning Bootcamp__ - [ ] Complete course __Mathematical foundations of Machine Learning__ - [ ] Make a contribution to an open source project - [ ] Get more into art & learn how to draw

Experience

HealthVerity

Manager, Platform Operations

August 2022 – Present

I manage the DevOps and Platform Engineering teams for HealthVerity.

I've worked hand-in-hand with our project managers and PMO to create sustainable processes for our DevOps team. I also led culture changes from both a team and department level for better documentation, observability, and growth by presenting best practices, giving regular feedback, and making these things part of our every day.

The Platform Engineering team is also responsible for building internal tooling to delight our engineers and help them stay productive by abstracting away inter-service connections, standardizing CI/CD flows, project structure, and communication. We accomplish this through the use of AWS CDK and our proprietary L3 constructs.

We managed HealthVerity's AWS infrastructure through IAC such as Terraform, AWS CDK, and even raw CloudFormation.

Highlights

Cricut, cricut.com

Engineering manager, ecommerce

June 2019 – July 2022

I lead the ecommerce engineering team, made up of 9+ engineers in both North America and across the world. Together, we build and maintain Cricut.com. We work with product managers, marketing teams, creative design teams, and our follow engineers to provide a world-class ecommerce experience.

As a team, we have integrated additional payment gateways, increased deliverability of online orders through verification steps, expanded internationally in both product selection and currency, and supported a very large subscription business.

As a leader, among other things, I have worked to define change management processes, build a team culture that promotes growth and trust, and build (and improve!) daily processes to ensure a reliable, swift software development cycle. I work with our technical recruiters to screen and interview candidates, both for technical skill and team culture fit.

Some other highlights

Software engineer

Jan 2018 - Jun 2019

I was a part of our Magento software engineering team, where we manage Cricut's Magento 2 eCommerce site and all the integrations that go with it. We work with product managers, marketing teams, creative design teams, and our follow engineers to provide a world-class ecommerce experience.

Manager, front-end engineering

May 2017 - Dec 2017

I managed a small team of developers, including the team workload, day-to-day tasks, communication with other departments, and mediating between people when necessary.

I was also involved with interviewing prospective employees and helping make decisions on how to build and grow the team. These decisions often included factors such as technical ability, culture fit, and how well the employee in question could work with others in the broader team.

My team built cricut.com, was in charge of updating and maintaining the content on shop.cricut.com, and is responsible for coding the email newsletters and campaigns that go out to our consumers. I also managed the Cricut Learn site and Help

Front-end engineer

Apr 2016 - May 2017

I joined the front-end engineering team in the Creative department in April 2016. Our team collaborates closely with direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing, UX, Visual Design, channel marketing, and product teams.

My first large project was helping finish the build for the Cricut Help Center on Drupal 8. My role was primarily front-end, building on the theme that was there. Afterwards, I worked with the product team to come up with the Learn site, which, with the help of a custom module, provides users with “playlists” of tutorials so people can learn how to use their Cricut machine and the accessories that come with it.

In June 2016, I was placed as the project lead on the Criuct.com rebuild project. We were responsible for transitioning cricut.com from Sitefinity 5.4 to Drupal 7. This involved a large content migration, a custom theme, and a custom site build.

My team’s primary function is to update our ecommerce site with the latest promotions and creative, maintain cricut.com, and code the email newsletters to blast out to our subscribing consumers. We are expected to work under tight timelines and be flexible in our work.



View experience before 2016

Veterans Advantage

Web developer

Sept 2015 – Apr 2016

Built 4 custom Drupal modules and an Omega sub-theme for the revamping of veteransadvantage.com. Integrated 3rd party APIs and a webhook listener into Drupal.

Lever Pulley

Web developer

Nov 2013 - Aug 2015

Building client's websites, creating Drupal themes, build new products, answer support tickets.

Newswire

Drupal Consultant

May 2014 - Aug 2014

Assisted in building a plan to migrate their current site, framework, and functionality over to Drupal.

Genroucity Marketing

Web designer

Nov 2012 - Jul 2013

Designed websites using Joomla! from PSD files. Also used WordPress and custom-built websites. Used PHP, AJAX, HTML/HTML5, CSS/CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery

Blusuit Web Solutions

Web developer

Jul 2012 - Oct 2012

Worked on various Drupal sites; rebuilt the CRM