About Ross Lambert...

As a former basketball coach, I love working with and contributing to great teams, but most especially technology teams tackling hard problems. Over the years I’ve won awards as a software engineer and solutions architect, but I started my technology career by hiring myself; I wasn’t sure anyone else would, anyway. I published newsletters and magazines for Apple // and Macintosh developers, as well as many fairly well-known programming libraries (QDFx, CDEF-City I, and CDEF-City II, to name three).

At the close of that era, I did my part to save the world by contracting with Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, WA. In collaboration with world-class materials scientists, we wrote TWEAT (Ternary Waste Envelope Assessment Tool) an interactive engineering tool that visually summarized known and predicted properties of glass when combined with weapons-grade radioactive waste. TWEAT had great value in expediting research into the safe disposal of the hottest radioactive waste in the world and was a finalist for an Apple Enterprise Award.

Still thirsty for software start-ups, I eventually joined Who’s Calling, the first company to integrate a telephone switch with the internet, literally inventing the category of call measurement and monitoring. I was fortunate to get to design and help implement a state-of-the-art interactive voice response platform (IVR) with dynamic call routing that is still in use today. Who’s Calling was purchased in 2008.

A few years later, I joined Insight Catastrophe Group where I was hired to build an entire development team from scratch–and continue work on a large product that had previously been wholly outsourced. Of all the stops in my long career, I am proudest of this effort: Not only was I able to hire and train a great virtual team (many of which are still close friends), but I also managed to institute best practices in DevOps, software architecture, and even engineering-related operations. The product itself is now the foremost quoting and binding platform for most of the homeowner’s insurance vendors in North America, and is also the backbone of ICG’s subsidiary, SageSure Insurance.

I eventually moved to Blueprint Technologies to help spin out a SaaS product subsidiary. Although the company elected to keep the product in-house, I still had the joy of pioneering work that ranged from face recognition, ambient computing, natural language processing, to ultra-high speed data pipelines using Spark.

Since my time at Blueprint, I have been carving out a new role, something I call “venture coding”: I’ve spent the last year or so helping start-ups engineer their minimum viable products.

An avid musician, I greatly enjoy making music and recording in my home studio and playing each week at church. I live in north central Washington state with my wife, Tamara, surrounded by beautiful orchards, vineyards, the Columbia River and the rugged north Cascades. Our daughter, Rebecca, lives close by with six grandchildren. Daughter Josephine currently resides in Spokane, WA.

I still miss my old Golden Lab, JC the WonderDawg. Might have to address that soon.

P.S. The little slideshow below is the answer to the question, “Ross, why would you live so far away from a major metro center?” Or perhaps it is an explanation for indulging in a “…career limiting move” as one Microsoft employee put it when I turned down their offer of employment. I believe I proved him wrong, although even if I didn’t my soul is the richer for it. All of these photos were taken either at my home or a short distance away.