I’ve spent the better part of the last decade working with Eric Savage at three companies. It’s no secret to anybody who was involved with StyleFeeder that he was key to our success. He’s excellent technically, utterly brilliant at product strategy and is exactly the guy you want on your team at 3am when you’ve got a production crisis.
After we sold StyleFeeder to Time Inc, one of the other product teams decided they needed some guidance from us. Eric volunteered. I called up the manager on the other team to prepare him for what was about to happen; Eric has a tendency to either (a) turn your ideas completely upside down and give you the perspective you’re missing or (b) push you to think about investing 10x more and getting 1000x in return. The manager called me back after their initial meeting. His reaction: “Wow.”
And that’s what I miss most about working with Eric. I hope we get a chance to do it again someday.
- Philip Jacob, founder of StyleFeeder
Eric is a technical force to be reckoned with. I have seen him tackle work in days that might have taken a small team weeks to complete (e.g. rewriting an entire app’s UI from Flex to jQuery). His familiarity with various open source projects led to good decisions for our teams infrastructure. He has excellent instincts in terms of architecting systems, produces extremely clean and readable code, and designs with scalability in mind.
- Bryan Barkley, Senior Software Engineer at Time Inc.
Eric is skillful, knowledgeable, and extremely productive, and he’s welcome company as well. I and my team have also enjoyed maintaining and reusing, for years, the code and systems he built at StyleFeeder and can attest to the overall quality, architectural soundness, and readability of the systems he built.
- Alex Nauda, Director of Shopping Technology at Time Inc.
In addition to working with Eric for several years at Digitas, I’ve also worked closely with him in a contract capacity at Cramer. Eric’s technical acumen, quality of deliverables, and productivity are unparalleled. Eric is the type of developer that just makes problems go away with almost no oversight or direction. I’m consistently impressed by his communication and ability to ramp-up on a new codebase or technology. Without question, Eric is one of the best Java developers I’ve had the pleasure to work with. In short, he’s the type of guy you want on your team.
- Steve Adams, VP/Technology at Cramer
Eric is an excellent engineer whom I’d love to hire again in the future.
While I was running the Platform team at HubSpot, Eric was the key guy building the Service Marketplace for us. He did the entire project implementation almost entirely by himself, delivering clean, solid, extensible, well-designed software. None of those adjectives come lightly or often.
Eric is also a pleasant guy, fun to hang around with, and a good team player with no ego. I would love to work with him again.
- Yoav Shapira, Vice President, Platform Strategy at HubSpot
Eric was a key member of our team throughout my time at Digitas. Not only for his technical and execution skills, but also for his excellent skills in interacting with our clients. He was able to influence senior decision makers at client sites to make important decisions on the spot, and rescued more than one distressed project almost singlehandedly. I would be happy to work with him again.
- Eric Kilby, Principal Software Engineer at Digitas
Eric is right at the top of the list among all developers I have ever worked with. A man of few words, he chooses his words wisely, and when he speaks, always listen for he almost always right. Beyond technical know-how, Eric has a strong business mind. As a developer, Eric has incredible versatility and with us did every form of Open Source (not just LAMP), managed complex eCommerce solutions and was able to innovate rapidly and successfully. Without a doubt, if I needed project work or an engineer for a startup, Eric would be my guy.
- Shergul Arshad, VP/Business Development at StyleFeeder