Kevin Laflamme Interview Paper

I chose to interview Kevin LaFlamme that works at a startup called, Lola. He is a

backend software engineer mainly working with Python. I was excited about the interview

because their business model of a 24/7 live travel agent in a mobile app is something I never

could have imagined. Luckily, he knew where to take off once I asked the questions so it was a

lot of talking on his part about what he did, going in depth about what I asked. Kevin is from

Boston, Massachusetts which happens to be where Lola is located. His first job experience was

out of school at a company also located in Massachusetts called Meditech. He worked at this

health care company for 5 ½ years. Kevin graduated as a math major but he learned how to

program at Meditech

After Meditech,

he would go to work at Aperion where he learned how to app wrap, Kevin LaFlamme took apart

pre-built apps, added code to add security features and redistributed it for the original developers.

He worked at Aperion for 1 year and a half before starting at Lola in February 2016.

So by this point I knew Kevin had almost 7 years of experience. He’d know by now how

things work, what type of working environment he prefers, handling disputes, etc. His expertise

shows during the interview as his responses weren’t met with ambiguity. At Lola, Kevin has to

work on the mobile app, which means having to work natively with Swift and Javascript for the

frontend work. For cloud-computing, their work is utilizing Heroku and Amazon Web

Services(AWS). He also has experience dealing with teams, collaborating, and setting up

meetings as that took up the second half of his work time. He and a team of about 10 developers

split their work by frontend work, backend work, and mobile development. Each team has to

constantly work together as they migrate their current python job queue manager from RQ to

celery. What struck me is how in my software engineering seminar that there is a large

At Lola, he said they are lucky enough that most

arguments are backed substantially by facts and with just a short amount of time the team can

assess and pick the best course of action. LaFlamme had actually been turned down when going

up to the head software architect to ask to migrate the job system to celery. It wasn’t until much

convincing that LaFlamme’s team was able to be approved for the migration. LaFlamme also

believed he had a quality that isn’t seen much across his team. This quality has to deal with

catching and fixing bugs early on in development. LaFlamme emphasizes how he likes to

recreate bugs in his own environment to think of ways to fix it. Catching bugs early on before

production can save a lot of headache because the production level is where those little bugs can

start to matter says LaFlamme.

Kevin LaFlamme says Lola is relatively unstructured compared to previous places he’s

worked at. He comes in everyday to an unclear objective that he has to work on. He says the lack

of direction can be confusing to those who are used to something clear to do at work. He

embraces this lack of direction as it allows for him to explore different ways of how to tackle