Colorado CTOs you should know: Nathan Smalley, CommercialTribe

makes a video-based practice platform that helps sales departments boost training impact and sales effectiveness. Nathan Smalley, the CTO of CommercialTribe, is in charge of keeping the company’s tech running smoothly. Smalley has over 23 years of experience leading technology teams. Over the years he has worked on a diverse array of projects, ranging from creating cyber defense software and protocols for the U.S. Army, to creating enterprise architecture and apps for sales training. We caught up with Smalley to get his opinion on the future of tech scene in Colorado. Here’s what he had to say:

What technologies power your business? We are using MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node). When we first started to work with NODE.js about 2+ years ago, we found it to be powerful and fast, and continue to approve of NODE’s performance and direction.

Angular is a different story. We used Backbone.js at first and there was a steep learning curve, but after that you really can go quickly and scale. Angular is one of those frameworks that are easier to jump into, but get harder the more you scale. For example, two-way binding of Angular seems amazing at first, but if you're not careful, as your app and team scale out very quickly, explicit data-flows and digest loops can definitely bite you on performance. We are looking at Angular 2, we’ll see. Enterprise software development just isn’t fun without technical debt, challenging frameworks, and the hope and regret cycle.

We picked MongoDB, and I know some folks are critical of it at times, but we really haven’t looked back. The MongoDB Enterprise support teams are terrific and helpful. Most of the problems we have had with Mongo were self-inflicted, and Mongo’s roadmap focusing on enterprise level features in the 3.2 release is music to our collective ears.

We also are pushing the envelop in video technology. Video playback is one thing to scale, but video recording at scale is a completely different animal. We have gone down the road with existing technology for a number of years, but just ended up building our own.

What upcoming tech project are you most proud of? We are getting involved heavily with “web top” frameworks such as Node-Webkit and Electron. Being able to re-purpose our web application into a desktop app is a huge time saver.

Also, we continue to pull metrics and behaviors out of video. Semantic word choice and tone analysis is our most recent initiative.

What trends do you see in the tech scene over the next three years? Besides Internet of Things, 3D printing, and mobile first frameworks, I think we’ll see “Big Data” get much more consumable and responsive by the average use case than it is today. The user experience will continue to blur the lines between mobile-web-desktop as well as B2B and B2C in general. We’ll begin to see more disruptive self-contained application architectures like Ethereum.

What sort of people do you look for when hiring? Of course we look for smart, hard working, consistent people. Cultural fit is very important to us, which is why we have group interviews and invite candidates to social settings to get to know them more. We also look for people that want to know more about the mission of our products and our company.

What are some lessons you’ve learned about working in Colorado? Words of wisdom? I moved to Colorado when CommercialTribe started to take off in 2014. The first year, 2013, I was still commuting. My first few meetups in Boulder and Denver were interesting. In general, I’ve found the people to be warm, friendly, and usually helpful. A few Colorado specific things I’ve learned:

Never ask someone at a Boulder Meetup to come interview in DTC
During an interview if someone asks if you drug test, it's probably not a good fit even if you don’t
Never trust the weather report, and always carry layers
Only tourists wait for the cross walk lights on the 16th Street Mall
Sitting on the Mall Ride seats is not recommended
Never try to learn to ski on a Saturday during peak season
Never go rock climbing if you think the scramble up to the base is hard
Don’t under estimate the altitude adjustment the first month, and always use that as an excuse
Never openly critique Peyton Manning
Illegal Petes is not the same as Chipotle

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