References

During the time that John Kirch worked at Gap Inc Headquarters in San Francisco, Nariman Shariat was his manager from August 2009 to October 2010 and again from April 2012 to December 2015. Nariman wrote the following reference on 17 October 2018:

In short, John was one of the most valuable people I have hired in my career. He is detailed and thorough on things he takes the lead on. He is creative on solutions. He plays the role of a stereotypical engineer in that he can get lost for days in building something and will need to be pulled out of it at times but that was always easy to do. I wouldn’t hesitate to hire him. Honestly if he was living in the NY area I would bring him on here at WeWork with me.

Now some concrete examples to help ease any concerns.

I hired John as a contractor about 9 years ago. One of the first projects he worked on was figuring out how to move Gap’s entire architectural drawing archive from a 3rd party hosted service to an internal solution. He did the research and found an open source product that could solve our needs. He had never worked with it but dove right in. He got it up and running as a prototype and presented it to our leadership. We got the green light and migrated over 4TB of documents into the solution. On top of that he built on top of the API to fully integrate it into our existing project management tools and added an indexer to provide search of all the documents. All of this in 3 months and saving Gap over $1m over 5 years. Plus our users were much happier with the new solution. This secured him a full-time position at Gap.

Part of the above project was also moving us from a single hosted server over to Amazon Web Services. At that time back in 2009 AWS was relatively new. John has some sysadmin experience but the means of the "cloud" were new to both of us. He hunkered down and learned what he needed to in a matter of a couple of weeks and came back with a solution. We migrated our entire project management application over to AWS and cut our cost in half while giving us a means of scaling much quicker than we had before.

When John joined the team he implemented code versioning for our team. His choice at that time was SVN. It was what he knew. That lasted us a few years but times changed and we needed to change. John again took the lead, it was time for Git. On his own time he learned and implement what he thought was the best practices for the team. He automated our deployment pipeline and again changed the way the team tested and deployed new features. Everyone on the team was much happier.

These are just 3 examples of John learning something he had no knowledge of before. I specifically picked examples that didn’t involve PHP to demonstrate his flexibility in an area that wasn’t his core skill. There are numerous examples of learnings related to the languages we used together and if you need them just let me know. Needless to say, in my opinion John easily demonstrates the ability to learn and once he has he will teach to others (I think in his heart teaching is his true passion in life).

One final note, I’ve worked with a lot of software engineers over the last 3 years and I always think back to the work John did. He balanced time and quality to deliver maximum value back to our users. I now realize this is something extremely rare in software development. I’d rather have 5 Johns than the 30+ engineers I work with today.

From September 2015 until November 2017 Katerina Novitskaya reported directly to John Kirch in her role as Software Engineer II at Gap Inc Headquarters in San Francisco. Katerina wrote the following referral for John Kirch on 3 October 2019:

I reported directly to John when we worked together to support an entire application comprised of over 10 different tools. John was the core architect of the application and I was constantly impressed by the level of detail that went into John’s code. He is truly a master of systems design and backend development. I had never worked with somebody so dedicated and passionate about creating software that made people’s lives/jobs easier. I had originally joined as a QA Engineer, but John took it upon himself to be my personal mentor and teach me most of what I know about Software Development. I will be forever grateful to him for the opportunities he has given me and the skills he has taught me. I can only hope that our paths will cross again in the professional world.