At Routable, we love to love our employees. Our Developer Spotlight series shows our support for a Routable engineer, celebrating every feature built, bug fixed, meme posted and everything in between. We share our developers’ unique stories and offer a peek into their lives at Routable.
Justin Myers is one of Routable’s most legendary characters.
Part code wiz, part Ukulele strumming star, Justin is a builder and creator at heart. As a teenager, he participated in coding camps and spent afternoons in self-guided learning library sessions hacking on Commodore 64, IBM 8086 and Apple 2 machines. Programming quickly became a means of self expression and exploration. After high school and some time on active duty with the army, Justin got a temp job at Microsoft. There, his knack for software blossomed, launching his career.
Justin joined Routable in 2018 as our very first engineer. Since then he’s written a colossal amount of our backend code in use today and has helped develop many of our internal processes and best practices.
Among the engineering, product and support teams, Justin is a wizard. He’s able to quickly help with any given problem of any size while juggling platefuls of tasks. He knows the intricacies of all our complex ledger integrations from Xero to QBO, NetSuite and Sage, and he can shepherd the architecture of our largest builds. He also often stands at the frontline to support clients joining Routable.
Justin is truly a champion of every one of Routable’s values, and his peers genuinely believe he possesses supernatural powers:
We wanted to learn a little more about Justin and his experience working at Routable, so we caught up with him for a quick Q+A.
What makes Routable different?
What really makes Routable different is the people and the culture. Starting at the top with Omri and Tom and their passion for building a great product and not skipping on things like customer support where other companies do.
You can see it in our Slack channels, in how inclusive we are and how much we care about our people. If you’re sick, go take the time off. Like, literally in the middle of a meeting it’ll be like, “Go, go take care of yourself.” You can come back or someone else can pick up your work or you can finish it when you’re feeling better.
Finding a place to work like this is truly rare. So many places will run people ragged and push people really hard, and as we continue to scale we’re making sure to instill a healthy environment from the top down.
What advice do you have for people joining Routable?
Communication is always going to be the best advice I can give someone. Let people know where you are, where you are struggling and things like that.
The second piece of advice is to ask for help. Don’t let yourself struggle forever when someone might have a quick answer. They might already have a method of doing the exact thing you’re struggling with.
Advice that’s more specific to us [developers]: Understand the complexity of what we’re building. One of the things I see developers struggling with is they’ll make a change and not realize the implications of that change. Take the time to really dig deep to understand what could happen when making changes.
What’s an interesting problem you’ve worked on at Routable?
The first is what we would call “Item creation” or “Payable/Receivable creation.” It’s not as straightforward as other objects we create. Rather, we have this basic thing that encompasses a payable or receivable, but it can be made 20 ways from Sunday. So, it’s interesting building stuff that works no matter what and at the same time isn’t too complicated to read.
Another, is our connection to the ledgers, building something that connects simple accounting softwares and more advanced ERPs like NetSuite and Sage Intacct in a standardized way. It’s interesting building something that can integrate with different accounting software and support all the custom fields and custom settings that those ledgers have.
Justin, what’s your passion in and outside of work?
Being with family and being out with nature are the two things I enjoy the most outside of work.
As far as at work, I love mentoring, I love teaching where I’m there to help support other developers and help them get to that next level of critical thinking and how to make awesome software. I think one can do awesome things next to a keyboard whether that’s writing code to move money or sharing pictures or AI or whatever. There can be a lot of glory in any type of program one decides to write.
Routable encourages folks take care of themselves by taking time off as needed. Justin will be taking a sabbatical soon and setting out on an adventure with his family to explore each of the national parks throughout the country. We wish him the best on his well-earned break and thank him for allowing us to put him in the Developer Spotlight.
Interested in joining our engineering team? Check out open roles on our careers page.
