Mark Castrovinci knows technology.Over the past 15 years, he’s held leadership positions at technology companies all over the world, helping build cutting-edge platforms and nurture successful teams.
Today, he’s commander-in-chief for all of Legacy.com’s tech development and innovation at their Calabasas office. The CTO helms Legacy’s online platform for memorials and obituaries. The company plays host to 30 million-plus visitors a month, making it one of the largest media companies in the world. We caught up with up him to get his thoughts on how technology is fueling Legacy’s success.
What technologies power your business?
We have several different platforms that support each of our different brands. We are currently in the process of building a new platform so we can support those businesses from a single, more efficient platform.
What technologies are playing the biggest roles in Legacy this year?
Everything is new in this new platform. We are moving to the cloud, using Docker to simplify environment management, using Node/React/JavaScript on the server for our web pages, open source database platforms such as PostgreSQL and Talend for managing our data and Drupal for a new CMS.
Los Angeles is known for having a large talent pool of thirsty, young workers. What are the top characteristics you look for in a potential hire?
We really focus on engagement and smarts. It's helpful if candidates are in the ballpark when it comes to specific technical skills. But I’m not going to discount someone who hasn’t specifically worked with Postgres but has done some amazing things with SQL Server and is super excited about everything they do. Our interviews are structured around teasing out a good discussion about a specific project a candidate has worked on, what it achieved for the business and how they contributed. If after we’re done they’ve been able to tell a great story that is clear, shows they really learned a lot, have in-depth knowledge on the topic and the conversation was dynamic and interactive then I will probably walk away thinking I’d really like to work with that person on the great stuff we’re building and solving.
How will LA specifically continue to strengthen its tech community in 2015?
LA is such a great place - period. There are so many things to do for fun that it's just a great draw for anyone who works hard and plays hard. The fact that there are already so many great companies here doing some exciting work in the Internet space means it will only continue to grow. It becomes one of the great places to be. It's also great that there are so many top schools and bootcamps here where students can just step into internships and full-time positions. We have two interns now and one bootcamp graduate that are outstanding members of our team.
What are lessons you've learned about working in LA that other local entrepreneurs can learn from?
There is a lot of competition for top talent here in LA. First, let’s hope you’re a company that knows where it is going. We’ve done a very good job developing and communicating our future direction I think that is a great selling point for our team and for people interested in joining us. If I can honestly communicate where we are going because it IS compelling then I think I’ll be able to find some great people who want to join us. Second I would say your culture has to be real. It is what you choose to make important. For us it is an atmosphere that encourages exploration, learning and a focus on making progress for our business. I want my team to be part of defining what will make us successful. Agile has been a very big part of this and letting our teams know this is what we’re expecting of them has helped to bring out strong internal motivators.
How would your team describe working with you?
Hopefully they see me as passionate about what we’re trying to accomplish, interested in doing what is best for Legacy.com and fostering a community across tech and product that results in building great things.
How do you go about improving and innovating Legacy using technology?
That’s a pretty broad question. It’s not just a Legacy thing — it’s what you hope every CTO comes in and does. It really starts with getting an understanding of where the company is at, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how well-positioned they are to meet those goals. It isn’t always just technology. I tend to look at four different buckets when a company needs improvement.
Architecture: I take a look at their overall architecture and see how well-positioned they are to innovate and extend what they have. A lot of times the architectures are older and brittle. They’re hard to add things to. It might just be a matter of breaking things apart a bit or throwing certain things away and replacing it. It’s a matter of what they are trying to accomplish and how up to task the existing systems are.
Processes: How are they operating? What are their software development life cycles like? What are the handoffs like between different groups? How well do they respond to outages? Are they capturing requirements properly? How well are they implementing them? How are they testing them?
Organization: Is the organization set up for success? Does it need changes?
Culture: Who’s getting along with who? What’s working; what isn’t? Are there ways I can improve upon that? Are there communication channels that can be better? Are there disconnects between different groups that can be improved by helping people understand that we’re all in this together?
What emerging technologies are you excited about?
I’m very pleased with where we are in terms of building web pages. If you look at our most recent platform release, you’ll see that our pages are lightning fast and extremely SEO friendly. They’re built on our new platform, and we will build everything on that moving forward.
The other thing is that working with the cloud is exciting, and using tools like Docker to create reusable deployment modules is very exciting, too. If you go back to the old days where you had to provision hardware, it could take weeks — and lots of capital and approvals. Working in a cloud environment is really wonderful when you’re talking about speed to market and testing your footprint as needed. It really helps you get things shipped quickly.
If you take a step back and look at how tech has evolved over the course of your career, what has it been like to be apart of that evolution?
Learning how to build distributed systems over time — systems that aren’t just one monolithic application, but are really a collection of systems that interoperate —and collecting information about them so you can measure and react to them has been very exciting to see evolve. It’s been nice to see certain things that just weren’t there early on become commonly available today. Can you imagine everybody trying to figure out how to manage big data sets? Google figured it out, and that’s been a wonderful evolution. There have been some great ideas to come along, and a lot of those ideas have worked their way into tools that are available to every company that is willing to embrace it.
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