Bret McGowen

My life principles are the three C's: be kind, be clear, and be quirky. I'm a passionate full stack software developer, occasional conference speaker, frequent traveler and less frequent runner. New York City is home, and I absolutely love it here.

* Ok fine, be "ckind", be "clear", be "cwirky" if you really want them to be Cs.

Fun facts about Bret

• Started programming by making a brickbreaker game on my TI-86 calculator
• Been to 80+ countries (and counting!)
• Visited 5 of 7 New Wonders of the World: Machu Picchu (Peru), Petra (Jordan), the Colosseum (Italy), Christ the Redeemer (Brazil), and the Taj Mahal (India). Still missing the Great Wall of China and Chichen Itza (Mexico).
• Completed 19 half marathons and 5 full marathons
• Summited the top of Mount Kilimanjaro (5.5 day climb!)
• Scuba/snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef
• In 2016 I ran the NYC marathon and went directly from the finish line to the airport, flew overnight to give 2 talks the next day in Belgium, then flew the NEXT day to Brazil to give another talk. 48 hours, 1 marathon, 3 continents, 3 talks. And then 5 days of being sick for doing something so dumb.

Celebrities I've seen in NYC

Folks often ask who I've seen in NYC. Here's a partial list:

• Olivia Wilde (sat next to her on the subway on my first trip to NYC!)
• John Oliver
• Patrick Stewart
• John Mulaney
• Chris Rock
• Liev Schreiber
• Ilana Glazer
• Sam Rockwell
• Trevor Noah
• Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things)
• Michael Shannon
• Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos)
• Cesar and Ricky (The Amazing Race 36)
• Jared Fried

Professional background

Strong technical and communication skills; well-rounded experience covering a breadth of software development project roles and perspectives. Worked in a variety of environments: Google, startup, non-profit, government nuclear laboratory, University, billion-dollar enterprise, and private consulting. Successfully guided projects through the entire lifecycle, from requirements, planning, visual design, architecture, development, quality assurance, implementation and maintenance.

Developed in all tiers of the application, from database design to business logic to front end user interface programming, with an emphasis on usability and building intuitive applications.

Prior to Google, I worked in the cloud industry at Rackspace as a software engineer. Before that, I led engineering teams at an e-commerce company, non-profits and tried my hand at creating two startups.

I've given a few Google Cloud talks at various conferences and events. Want to see me on stage? Here's a talk I gave on Knative + Kubernetes + Serverless.

I earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Texas A&M University. I'm on Twitter at @BretMcG.

Personal

I have lived all over, from Virginia to New Mexico to Germany to Texas and New York City. I absolutely love traveling and have been to 80+ countries (and counting!). I'm also an avid runner and have run 19 half marathons and 5 full marathons.

Gratuitous headshot

In case anybody was curious, yes I have a bigass headshot of me.