Welcoming Brian Kerr, our new Customer Success Engineer

As we continue on our journey to scale support, we met Brian Kerr who's been one of the key members of the Postmark team at ActiveCampaign.

Brian is a customer success lead with 8+ years of experience who knows a lot about the email space. Before Postmark, he worked at Wildbit supporting Beanstalk (deployment service), DeployBot (CI/CD), and Conveyor (Git hosting).

Here's one of our favorite blog posts from him: The Problem with Delight.

More about Brian

How did you get into software?

How old would it make me sound if I remember using an Apple II when floppy disks were truly floppy? Between rounds of MECC Rocket Factory at school, I remember emailing my dad at work while trying to remember terminal commands.

Fast forward many years, and a failed attempt at becoming a Civil Engineer, a friend in college mentioned “Hey, I heard about a degree with computers, it seems like something you'd be interested in…”.

After college, it was messing with the Twitter API, Python, and ImageMagick realizing I could Tweet out images on demand.

Why are you at Resend?

When meeting with the Resend team, the energy, excitement, and desire to craft the best communication experience possible for the user was infectious. That's shown with little UI details, an easy to understand API, or API logs easily accessible. I can't wait to help build the best email API for developers by helping ensure the customer experience is the best possible.

Where do you find #inspiration?

Nature. I'm fascinated by prairies or tide pools. From a distance, they may look like a few plants or a small pool of water. Look closer and there's a complex ecosystem where each rock, fly, or piece of algae plays an important role. It feels like a nice analog for an infrastructure service where many small pieces come together for an extraordinary experience that wouldn't be possible without each other.

If you weren't programming, what would you be doing?

I can't imagine anything else. If I were to pick something, it'd be creating something physical, like custom home building.

What does your desktop/home screen look like?

Pro-tip: I create a “Desktop” junk drawer on my desktop to put the files that normally clutter the desktop. Then change the default screenshot location in macOS to place screenshots there.

Favorite tool?

Working in Pomodoros (25-minute blocks) is my favorite way to close out distractions and focus on a task. To help make myself accountable for that, Focus is a huge help. With a hotkey, you can quickly block distracting sites like YouTube, start a Pomodoro, and be on your way to accomplishing your task.

Favorite hotkey?

Command-Option-Shift-V: This copies your clipboard as plain text rather than rich text. Handy when you're moving text from one text editor to another without keeping weird formatting intact.

Favorite place to visit?

A coffee shop early in the morning. The hum of espresso machines, coffee grinders, and a good sci-fi book (Currently enjoying The Ministry of Time). Somehow an hour can pass by in an instant.

Advice for ambitious software engineers?

Fail often, ask questions. and remember humans use your software.

When you're new at something, it's natural to worry about doing something wrong. Sometimes doing something wrong is the only way to learn the right way to do something next time. Do it bad today, and do it better tomorrow. Steve Jobs was fired as the CEO of Apple before he was re-hired and became the CEO of Apple that he's remembered for.

The flip side of that is if you're truly not sure about a task, ask questions to whomever can help you. If an instruction in the documentation isn't clear, clarify the proper steps before taking action. And update the documentation for the next person in your shoes.

There's always a human using your application. Talk to them. Learn what problems they're facing. And what problems they're expecting your software to solve. You may realize there's a much easier way to solve the problem you're trying to solve. Or there's a much bigger problem to solve. You'll find customer obsession is often a key to success.