Coding for Sales Software
Justin Vaillancourt is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Dooly, the connected workspace pioneer and leading CRM automation software making Salesforce fast and painless. In his role as CTO, Justin leads a rapidly scaling team of engineers.
Tell us about your background.
I didn’t have a typical career path, but it was certainly interesting. I actually started programming at a really young age. Around the age of 8 years old, a fascination with computers developed and I was constantly messing around with our home computer — which led to me breaking it, of course! To avoid a grounding from a very angry dad, I had to learn how to fix my computer after playing around with it and this led to a life-long fascination with all things computer-related.
Enter high school where I discovered a community of people focused on game console hacking. I decided to start a website geared specifically towards the Nintendo DS audience. While doing this, I was approached by a software company to build a similar online community but within the healthcare space. I kept this job all through high school.
After high school graduation, I was fortunate enough to use my experience to jump straight into tech consulting and eventually joined a software development team before winding up at Mobify where I met Kris Hartvigsen, my now business partner. The rest, as they say, is history as Kris and I worked together to found Dooly, a workplace enablement platform for sellers.
What do you work on?
My role these days is on scaling our rapidly growing company! The irony of being in love with technology and product, and building a great company around that, is that the more successful you are the less time you have for building. Before you know it, your responsibilities are hiring, strategy, evolving process, and everything in between.
There comes a time where you have to make a conscious decision as to whether you want to continue down that path of whether you find people to fill those shoes so that you can go back to your technical roots. I have found both roles can be incredibly gratifying. People with engineering backgrounds bring a unique perspective to designing an organization. I like to think of Dooly, the organization, as a system. Where are the bottlenecks? How can we improve the speed and quality of decision making? It’s my belief that a well-oiled organization will succeed. As system thinkers, we are well positioned to bring a lot of value here.
Ultimately, I have decided to pursue my passions for both product and technology. I’m still working on the transition from my technical roots but am enjoying the continued learning process. Just know that there is no one right path — everyone’s journey is unique.
How do you use coding in your industry/projects?
Our product at Dooly is software so the bulk of our coding investments are there. However, I often find myself writing scripts or automating little things with code to help streamline work. These can be incredibly fun to build and save a ton of time. Bonus, it helps to keep my skills sharp!
What tools and programming languages do you use?
These days, I primarily work with Ruby and TypeScript. I also have experience with everything from C, Delphi, to C# and sometimes even find time to dabble with Elixir and other new languages which is always fun.
Any last tips for young coders?
Today, there are a TON of great resources available to young coders to learn and expand on their skillset. This didn’t exist when I was growing up — take advantage of these! My advice to anyone learning is to build things that you think are fun. Personally, I learned by doing — modifying other people’s games, reverse engineering software, reading open source code, etc. Follow your curiosities and, most importantly, have fun along the way. This will take you very far.
