Our Team

Steve Ropa

Cofounder/Master Craftsman

Steve has more than 28 years of experience in software development and 22 years of experience working with agile methods. Steve is passionate about bridging the gap between the business and technology and nurturing the change in the nature of development.

As an Agile mentor and consultant, Steve has supported clients across multiple industry verticals including: telecommunications, network security, entertainment and education. A frequent presenter at agile events, he is also a member of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance. He has spoken at many conferences around the country on the topic of Agile practices and Craftsmanship, including the international Agile Conference in 2011, 2014 and also 2015.

Meet Steve and hear a little that he has to say here on:

Technical Excellence at Agile 2015

Software Craftsmanship at Agile 2014

Joe Gee

Master Craftsman/Co-founder

Joe is an experienced developer, coach, and technical leader with nearly 20 years coaching Agile development teams. His passion for the craft of software development has stretched from childhood into a lifelong professional practice. As co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Programmers Guild, it has been his focus and mission to grow programmers in the skills that distinguish the highest performing professionals and teams.

As a teenager, Joe built mathematical modeling systems, operating systems, and developed an early open source online multiplayer game with hundreds of daily players. Those projects created a passion for well-made software that led to a formal degree in Computer Science and Engineering and an internship building hardware controllers for city infrastructure.

Joe has built multiple large data enterprise platforms serving the world largest telecoms and financial organizations. While he enjoyed the distributed computing and artificial intelligence, he was closer to his core passion of supporting great software development when he was building software engineering and modeling tools that won two Jolt Cola awards.

His passion for effectively delivering well-made software lead him to be an early adopter and advocate for Extreme Programming and other Agile/Lean methods. In 2014, he co-founded the Rocky Mountain Programmers Guild with the mission of finding effective ways to help programmers grow in their abilities to deliver robust, reliable software effectively and sustainably. He has coached programmers in technical and planning skills at companies large and small including Bell Labs, Comcast, Pacific Gas and Electric and others.

Joe is a frequent speaker on Software Craftsmanship in the Denver area, including Mile High Agile, Agile Denver, and co-organizes the Rocky Mountain Software Craftsmanship group. He co-authored the book Agile Development and Business Goals released by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Joe received a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Colorado. He lives with his wife and 3 children in the Denver area. When he is not building software, he explores other forms of craftsmanship by building furniture in his woodshop.

Meet Joe and hear a little that he has to say here:

YouTube