IT Core Spotlight: Fran Fabrizio

Spotlight Date: December 07, 2014

Name: Fran Fabrizio
Role: IT Director
Project: All of them?
Favorite Dev Tool: Coffee
Fun Fact: Tallahassee is farther west than Detroit. Oh, you mean about me?<p>

What’s the coolest thing you’ve gotten to work on at the MPC?

Building the team. Team building is incredibly challenging, but ultimately incredibly fulfilling as well.

If you were a programming language, what would it be? Why?

Perl. It wasn’t my first programming language, but it was the first language I truly loved. It’s messy but practical. It doesn’t concern itself much with appearances - it just gets stuff done. It has chameleon-like ability to morph itself into the tool you need at that moment. This seems to me to be a pretty decent approach to life.

When you’re not wrangling data at the MPC, what other things keep you busy? Mainly, my son - I’m pretty sure some sort of fusion reactor at his core is responsible for his ridiculous level of energy at all times. I also am getting more into biking (Minneapolis rubbing off on me, I guess) - I bought my first “real” bike last year and I’ve been trying to make the 11-mile commute to work as often as I can. I catch up with hockey late at night with the DVR.

What was the last thing you presented on / wrote about?

Scaffolding for a Growing Team: How to Introduce Structure Without Being Evil, at Surge 2014.

What new skill(s) are your currently trying to learn?

I try to dedicate time each week to keeping my technical skills sharp. I've been playing with some APIs (Google, Evernote) and Apache Spark lately.