Home2019-02-19T06:04:05+00:00

Happiest When Building Things

At a Code Camp with @venkat_s

About Me

Mom putting me to work on my first computer; an intel 286!

Professionally, I’m proudest of my passion and ability to build complex software applications that help people and businesses accomplish tasks more effectively. I’ve bootstrapped and exited a business, got to build and manage amazing teams and had the pleasure to work with the brightest people in my industry. My passion is split between: managing brilliant teams that can get things done and writing code that I can hopefully be proud of in the future (but mostly I wonder who wrote that crap! 🤦‍♂️, thank you specs!)

I hold a degree in Computer Science from the University of Houston where I was fortunate enough to have one of the best mentors anyone could wish for.

When I’m not coding, you’ll find me reading, writing, traveling, dancing cooking or working on a side project. You can reach me at nash[at]kabbara.us.

Some of My Principles

As a Manager/Lead

  1. My primary task is to remove all annoyances and friction that my team is experiencing in order to increase daily happiness & productivity.
  2. Develop a mantra that we can all live by which guides our daily behavior towards each other. My favorite: Empathetic, unboxed, and goal oriented.
  3. Collaborate with leadership & team to create a clear set of technical guidelines derived from the org’s long term strategic goals. These serve to act as a compass to help guide us in picking the right technologies and practices.

As a Developer

  1. Actively work on removing barriers to flow.
  2. Spend half a day a week honing a specific skill (not excluding the basics).
  3. Learn something that requires a different way of thinking.
  4. Constantly improve interpersonal skills namely how to optimally blend into a new team culture.

Favorite Books

I’m very binary on whether a book makes my favorites list. If it changed my perspective in some way or if it helped me solve a real world problem, it’ll make my list. You’ll notice some are not directly related to managing teams or to software, but we are in the business of mapping the real world to the digital world and these made the mapping easier for me in some way.

  • Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Management)
  • The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Management)
  • The E-Myth (Management)
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Management)
  • Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software (Management/Code)
  • Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (UX)
  • Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? (UX)
  • Creating Interfaces with Bulma (UX/Code)
  • Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems (Architecture)
  • Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Design)
  • Design Patterns in Ruby (Design)
  • Confident Ruby: 32 Patterns for Joyful Coding (Code)
  • Advanced Google AdWords (read it to understand adwords API for an integration project) (Code)
  • JavaScript: The Good Parts (Code)
  • Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way (Code/Security)
  • More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs (Code)
  • Thinking Recursively (CS/Code)
  • Good To Great (Business/Management)
  • Crossing The Chasm (Business)
  • Four Steps to the Epiphany (Business)
  • The Long Tail (Business)
  • The Art of Profitability (Business)