The Production Support team at ShowClix is a critical part of our continued success. They are responsible for handling custom development projects for our partners, building quality internal tools, and helping with the day-to-day maintenance of our platform. This month, we are excited to feature Kyle Wetherald, one of our Production Support Engineers.
In 2006, Kyle graduated Bluffton University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Youth Ministry. He worked as a youth pastor for 2 years before he eventually decided to make a change in his career path. He decided to go back to school, choosing the University of Pittsburgh, where he graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. During his time at Pitt, he worked as a Software Engineering Intern at Immunetrics, a biotechnology company in Pittsburgh, where he worked on a web-based data-exploration tool. He joined the ShowClix team as a Software Engineer, and after almost 3 years of working with us, he is now a Production Support Software Engineer.
As a Production Support Engineer, you focus a lot on third-party integrations like credit card gateways and fraud detection services. Tell us what a typical week looks like for you.
As a part of the Production Support team, I get a lot of small tasks that take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. It could be anything from enabling a setting, to writing a script for a large data import, to monitoring every obscure corner of the codebase for any potential quirks. I also usually have a larger project on my plate, like integrating with a third party service or adding a small feature. If one of our partners asks for an integration with a payment gateway, chances are pretty good that I will implement it.
What is the most interesting project you worked on and what made it stand out to you?
I really enjoyed my very first project, a reboot of our Top Cities report. It was a fun little project and was a good way for me to get to know the structure of the codebase. Plus, it looks pretty cool and gives some interesting insight on where your customers are located.
You often work on-site at our partners’ events, monitoring our on-site photo station among other things. What do you like most about working on-site at events?
Events are what ShowClix is all about and we have some pretty amazing partners putting on some really cool events! Some of my favorite events are the pop-culture events like New York Comic Con and Star Wars Celebration. It’s really great to see fans so excited about something that you helped them get to take part in. It’s also very helpful to use the product live at an event because it gives me insight on how to make it better. There’s no better way to empathize with an end-user than to become one yourself.
You recently started fostering two little ones. Tell us what it’s like being a first-time father to a young girl and boy both under 5 years old!
It has certainly been a huge adjustment! Andrea and I went from zero to two kids in an instant and we’re still figuring out how to be good parents. The kids are great though, and we’ve had so much support from our friends and family. Having so many dads in the office has been nice for when I need advice or when I want to complain about just how terrible the “terrible twos” can be.
We shared a great photo of you posing with a puppet a little while back. Tell us about that!
At my church, a few friends and I like to put on a puppet show for the kids about once a month. Â A few years ago, someone from the church brought all the necessary supplies for making puppets to our annual church retreat, and that’s where Walter was born. Walter is grumpy but loves to tell terrible jokes – especially ones that involve elephants. I brought Walter into the office when I first started at ShowClix because our team page used to have both a serious photo and a silly photo of each of the employees, and I thought a grumpy, elephant-joke-telling puppet fit the bill!