Garrick has spent over 20 years as a developer in both waterfall and traditional agile environments, and as an agile technical coach. He’s written everything from enterprise help desk software shipped on CD-ROMs to Android and iOS based social media marketing apps, and every manner of internal business and public facing web applications for industries such as customer support, telecom, advertising, and health care. In his journey into technical coaching, he’s applied his experience to help others learn by doing as well.
Garrick is a longtime proponent of software crafting practices and has spent most of his full-time development work doing pair-programming, mob/Ensemble programming, test-driven development (TDD), refactoring, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) across numerous programming languages & application stacks. Most formatively, he started with these practices full time in 2004 as part of an internationally distributed XP team with members in the UK, US, and Singapore and continued applying and learning for eight years. When the company direction changed and the US team shut down, he seized the opportunity to work in technical coaching, building on his training and mentoring skills that had formed organically over the years in XP teams.
Parallel to his professional career, Garrick has volunteered and worked with local Seattle area college programs. Significantly, he worked as a volunteer with the Highline College Web Developer program in the 2012-2013 school year where he and the instructor converted the capstone course from waterfall to Scrum and presented their experience report at Scrum Gathering New Orleans 2014. Most recently, he was an adjunct instructor co-teaching Green River College’s SDEV 485/486 capstone courses, advising students on delivering their senior projects to actual customers for the Bachelor of Applied Science in Software Development class of 2021.
Garrick was born in Michigan, but now considers himself a “naturalized Seattleite” living with his wife and two cats in Renton, WA. He denies having a “pinball problem” and says he can quit playing any time he wants.
