Meet the Team: Peter Coppinger, Founder and Lead Developer

We are going to make more of an effort to show you behind the scenes here at TeamworkPM HQ. As part of this initiative, we are going to introduce you to each of the team members. First up is Digital Crew Founder and Lead Developer Peter Coppinger...

OK, over to you Peter... tell us a little about your background...

Hi All, it's good to introduce myself and come out of my programming dungeon office for some air...

I'm 32, live in Cork City, Ireland and I love my job. In fact I started programming on a commodore 64 back in the day when I was just 8. At 10 years old I was inspired when reading about good old Bill Gates and even then I knew that I wanted to make amazing software with a like-minded team of great developers.

I co-founded Digital Crew over 11 years ago. For many years we were a small web consultancy and we completed hundreds of content managed websites for small and medium sized companies. We transitioned to developing powerful web applications for multinational clients.

About 3 years ago we decided that we needed to get more organised and so we searched for an online project management application. What we found dismayed us and so that summer while visiting my sister in Boston for a few weeks, I set about creating TeamworkPM. I programmed version 1.0 on my lonesome sitting on my sisters sofa in the sweltering heat. TeamworkPM has come a long way since that version 1.0 and we have learnt a lot in the progress. I thoroughly enjoy getting down and dirty with both the code, database and interface design.

I love making great software for you and I'm more motivated by your positive feedback and the satisfaction of a job well done than I ever will be by money.

 

So what do you work on each day...

I'm responsible for developing the TeamworkPM codebase and keeping everything running efficiently. We have a rule that bugs must be fixed before any new features are added so every day I come to work and check the bug list. We typically try to clear the list of small and large bugs before moving on to feature development. When any bugs are cleared, I turn to the roadmap, pick the most important task and I get stuck in. 

I also spend a lot of time optimising TeamworkPM so that everything is nice and fast. I check logs for slow queries, add indexes and optimise them and implement caching mechanisms that allow us to scale and provide a better, faster experience. We believe that speed is an important feature for TeamworkPM.

Finally we're a small team so we are all stay involved in answering your feedback and marketing TeamworkPM.

 

What are you working on today?

Today I've been putting the finishing touches on a new file upload server system. Over the last week I've designed and implemented a system to take over the processing of all our file uploads (and thumbnail and file serving) so that these file uploads won't have an impact on the performance of the main application. Once this system is rolled out, uploads will be faster, thumbnail generation will be faster and better, and the entire TeamworkPM application will be a little faster, more robust and able to scale better. So you should expect a subtle speed improvement in a few days time.

Anything to add?

Just to say that we have BIG plans for TeamworkPM. It's already pretty damn good but in a few months time, it's going to knock your socks off.

It's a pleasure working on software that helps thousands of companies around the world do their work faster and better. For me, it's extremely gratifying when I see your posts on twitter, feedback and testimonials that recognise the hours of design, re-design, debate and programming effort that went into a feature. So to you all I say thank you and if you haven't chimed in already we'd love to get a testimonial from you. Cheers! :o)

New database server plugged in

This morning we performed another update to improve the framework and architecture of the Teamwork platform.

We have plugged in another high performance database server to the cluster. All done in less than 10 minutes thanks to Peter's planning.

Here's Peter performing the final steps....yes, that's a breakfast roll on the desk. The staple of Irish diets....