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I'm excited to interview and introduce our newest team member and senior developer, Adam Hake! 

Q: Hi Adam! Welcome to Foster Made. What brings you here?

A: I’ve spent my whole career at agencies.  I’m drawn to the diversity of work, rapid pace, and  the need for a mixed skill set that agency life brings. I was craving a place that was known for its development capabilities, was invested in staying up to date with evolving technologies, and had a casual but competent culture.  Foster Made checked those boxes.I started out building CMS backed websites using PHP and front-end technologies at a digital agency.  I then moved into application development using Ruby on Rails.  We built a few healthcare applications for Richmond start-ups, which was a lot of fun.  I worked with a diverse team of developers, designers, and user-researchers and really enjoyed that cross-functional collaboration. From there, I moved to a larger agency, where I led the development team and worked on a wide breadth of projects across PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript-based platforms.

Q: You live in Richmond, VA not far from our office. Are you a Richmond native?

A:  I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, in and around Amish country.  It’s a quaint and beautiful area, and I certainly miss the access to farm stand produce and Amish baked goods (shoofly pie is the best!).  I moved to Richmond to attend college and really fell in love with the place.  I’ve been here for about 15 years and live with my wife and two kids in Church Hill.

Q: You’re an avid reader, is that right? What’s your favorite genre/book/series?

A: I do love to read. I’m a bit all over the place in terms of genres: science fiction, fantasy, classic and contemporary literature, and popular science non-fiction are all on the table for me.  Some favorites include the Three Body Problem trilogy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics, and the Lord of the Rings.  And I’m always looking for recommendations.

Q: Would you ever write your own book?

A:  Oh man, I do often think about writing a book.  However, I don’t have the skill nor perseverance to do that, at least at this point in my life.  I’m drawn to the intersection of science and society (a big reason why I like the Three Body Problem so much).  There are so many weird, mind-bending mysteries in physics that seem ripe for creative exploration.  I also love the world building that many science fiction and fantasy authors are capable of.  I think it would be a lot of fun to construct a whole universe and create a narrative out of that.

Q: You went to school for physics and (if I recall correctly) you did a little woodworking and were an arborist. Did I get all that right? You seem like quite the polymath. A man of many interests.

A: Yes, I was a physics major at the University of Richmond. I also did research every summer I was there.  I needed to get out of the mental work I had been doing for four years, and I’ve always been fascinated with furniture making, so after graduation I went to a wood working school in northern Vermont.  After that, I needed to make some money, but I was still itching to be outside.  I grew up rock climbing a lot, and I saw a “tree climber” ad for an arborist back in Pennsylvania.  It was a fun, albeit exhausting job. It was also during this time that I rekindled my interest in programming and started doing some web development.

Q: I hear you play a little soccer like many Foster Made employees before you, is that right? What position do you play? Have you played with any of us? Not to put you on the spot, but are any of us any good? I myself enjoy soccer but I’m terrible at it.

A: I’ve played soccer since I was a kid.  I’m a midfielder and still play in CVSA, Richmond’s adult recreational league, with Shawn.  Shawn is a brick wall in defense (and I’m not just saying that because he’s my manager).  It was a pleasant surprise to find out that several Foster Made colleagues play or enjoy soccer, I even found a fellow Liverpool supporter.

Q: Getting back to business, tell us the story of how you got into web development.

A: In college, I had to do a little programming to aid in the research I was doing.  I conducted biophysics experiments on E. coli that produced a lot of data.  I wrote some programs to process and analyze that data.  After college, in the early 2010s, I watched the webspace really explode and had this nagging curiosity about how a website went from code on a server to an interactive experience on a browser.  I was able to leverage my previous experience to learn web development and landed a gig with a digital agency in Richmond.

Q: How do you anticipate your previous role as Director of Development will translate to your work here?

A: My previous role afforded me opportunities to think strategically about client work and to do more solution architecting than building applications from an already defined spec.  I like working with clients to understand what problems they face and determine the best solution that fits within their requirements.  I also managed a team, and I really enjoyed the teaching and mentorship that came with that.  Finally, I liked interfacing with cross-functional teams to collaboratively figure out best practices and efficient ways of doing our work.

Q: Is there anything about your job or being a programmer that people might find mundane but excites you? 

A: When I started out in development, I was amazed to see the code I wrote come to life in the browser.  Over a decade later, I still find that magical. We all take for granted how websites and the technologies behind them work.  But it’s incredible that between typing in a URL and interacting with a rendered page, a million things happen involving a multitude of machines and networks located around the world, yet it all just takes milliseconds.

Q: On the flip side, what’s the most boring thing?

A: I find it harder to engage in work that is absent of a “why”.  While I don’t think it’s realistic to expect every project to be clearly linked to a business strategy or backed by user research, I find that work to be harder to be enthusiastic about.  I believe we as developers, as the folks building applications, do our best work when we are invested in the underlying strategy and understand the link between what we are building and how it’s helping end users and our clients’ businesses.

Q: Finally, given that you’ve been here for over a week, you’ve probably perused the snack options in our office kitchen. If you could add anything to the grocery list, what would it be? Make it fun because we all have to live with the consequences if Listwella buys it for us.

A: As much as I wish I were still in my 20s and could eat any snack with reckless abandon, my thirties have proven that’s no longer the case.  I appreciate the healthy snack options like fig bars and would welcome anything along those lines.  There are also lots of snack subscription services that curate and deliver snacks from all over the world. That would be fun!