Jake Bathman

Hi! I’m Jake (he/him/his), and I live north of Dallas, Texas, USA (Central Time, UTC-6 currently). I’m a dad to three kids and three cats, have been working fully remote for Tighten since 2018, and enjoy video games in the evening.

At Cadence OneFive, my role is…

Lead Programmer (my job title at Tighten)

Who am I?

Away from work

I coach my youngest kid’s soccer team (the Unicorns, a team of eight 7-year-old girls), and enjoy spectating my oldest in select soccer and middle in select basketball (and keeping meticulous stats on them, just because). I play lots of video games, from shooters like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Overwatch, to my favorite single-player story-based series like Horizon: Zero Dawn and The Last Of Us, with tons of small games in between.

I’m also a big reader (mostly sci-fi, fantasy, and general fiction), and my favorite gamified stat right now is having read my kindle for 270 weeks in a row.

At work

Since 2018 I’ve worked for Tighten, and before that in 2015 worked my very first programming job using Laravel 4.2. I’m fully self-taught, brute force learning PHP and frontend to help my friends and I coordinate to win Call of Duty tournaments.

Before that, I worked for a large county in the Dallas area on public health emergency preparedness, making and exercising plans for how we’d respond to anything from anthrax attacks on a Cowboys game to smallpox to an emerging infectious disease like Covid. I’m glad to not have been in that line of work in 2020.

Ways of working together

I’m happy working on consensus for a topic, then going off and building it, meeting back up when needed for checkins or to help each other.

You can lean on me to…

I’m good at feedback, either on an informal idea you have or a gnarly pull request. I don’t like to nitpick, because everyone has their own way of accomplishing a goal. I’m more interested in the thought behind a piece of work and whether it’ll do what we need.

How to support me as we work together

Feel free to ask for more from me if you need it. I usually prefer async updates on my work, since it’s hard in software to set an arbitrary deadline for some work.

How to support me as a person

I’ll often pop out mid-afternoon for up to an hour as my kids walk home from school to get them home, have a snack, and practice some spelling words. If I ignore you during this time, don’t take it personally; I’ll be back soon. I’ll usually wrap up some loose ends of the day after the kids are in bed.

I’m my best self on a team when…

In team discussions, I usually fall into a facilitator role by nature, but I always try to be cognizant not to capitalize a discussion, but simply help corral it.

Feedback preferences

Feedback often and in whatever medium the giver prefers is fine with me.

Schedule and availability

US Central (UTC-6), and I’m typically at my desk from ~14:30 to ~22:30