BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Patrick Puente

Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.

Hi Patrick, tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

In the summer before I started high school my mom signed me up for coding classes at the local university. We studied QBasic and Pascal. I used QBasic to build a Superman game and loved the feeling that I got when my little Superman sprite shot a laser into the UFOs attacking Earth. Throughout high school, I learned to write HTML, CSS and started to scratch the surface of JavaScript by building websites for my bands.

After high school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I installed flooring, sold tacos, worked customer service, ran QA for a satellite TV installation dispatch center, calculated legal settlement costs for a car company, played lots of music, and learned how to sleep in tour vans. In 2005, hurricane Rita forced me and my roommates to evacuate from our small apartment in southeast Texas (SETX). Non-emergency personnel wasn’t allowed back into the disaster area for several weeks. I ended up as a refugee staying with friends of friends in Austin and living on Red Cross and FEMA payments for a month or so. When we were finally able to return, our apartment building was condemned and my amp had a ceiling beam laying on it (That amp still works because Peavey knows how to make a solid amp). A lot of folks from SETX ended up relocating permanently to Austin. I was one of them. I continued making music and working jobs in call centers and the service industry. One of those jobs was entry-level tech support for internet service providers. There I met a drummer that ended up being a bandmate and one of my dearest friends (I miss you, Chris Hall!), as well as a couple of other folks who, years later, found their ways to BigCommerce.

After a few years in Austin, I enrolled in Austin Community College with the intention of transferring to UT to finish a degree in chemical engineering. Then I took organic chemistry. So naturally, I decided to revisit my old hobby: web development. I changed majors and began studying computer science. In the end, I never ended up transferring to UT. When I look back on it, I don’t regret it. I didn’t need student loans to pay for classes at ACC, but UT was inaccessible without taking on debt that I’m happy to not carry now.

Come 2013 and I’m staring down the last two months of a temp contract at Apple without a guarantee of renewal. The drummer that I met while working internet tech support told me about the software company he’d just been hired onto a few months prior and gave me a referral. I’ve never been particularly great at interviews and apparently didn’t impress the recruiter, but Chris put in a good word for me and got me over the line (Thank you, Chris Hall!). The next thing I know, I’m in new-hire training at BigCommerce.

What team are you working on?

I am part of the Enterprise Solutions Architects team.

Clients and agencies leverage our services to help them understand the best ways that BigCommerce can help them meet their requirements and integrate with the rest of their tech stack. Sometimes we’re helping a technology vendor determine the best way to implement their solution on BigCommerce, sometimes we’re helping clients integrate BigCommerce with their ERP, PIM, OMS, WMS, POS, CMS, ESB, iPaaS, etc. Sometimes we guide the discovery and design phases of a client’s project to capture their requirements and translate them into functional specs.

We also act as an internal consultative resource for teams across the company and hold weekly office hours for our colleagues on the other Professional Services teams.

Do you feel like you took a traditional or non-traditional path to become an Enterprise Solutions Architect?

This question assumes that there is a “traditional path.” Life is complicated and folks end up in different places at different times for different reasons. But if there is a “traditional path” to this job, then I don’t think it looks like mine.

What was your path to becoming an Enterprise Solutions Architect at BigCommerce? Have you held any other roles here?

I started at BC as a front-line Tech Support agent (known internally as ninjas). Knowing a thing or two about building websites helped me to excel in that role and, relatively quickly, I moved to the Escalations Engineers team where I got my hands dirty troubleshooting API integrations and front-end code. Some of the more senior team members really went out of their way to help me learn new skills (thank you Julio Sevilla, Jason Zamora, Steve Bownds, Fred Dobson, and anyone I’m forgetting!).

After a while, the Support organization saw a need for more specialized new-hire training for tech support staff and I volunteered to help audit the curriculum. Shortly after, I was managing the “ninja nesting” program and helping ninjas ramp up after new-hire training. That experience lent itself well to my next role as Learning Content Manager in the Learning & Development org.

There, I redesigned, rebuilt, and facilitated the new hire product training programs. I delivered training to everyone from sales and tech support to the C-suite and everyone in between. I benefited from working for a manager who really knew a thing or two about building a learning organization (thank you Kevin Buechler!) and together the team implemented my product training curriculum for all new hires (in-person and remotely), partner agencies, and clients. In the time since I left that team, those programs have blossomed under Kevin’s leadership into fully-fledged educational services.

While I loved my time teaching in the classroom, producing learning content, and scrambling to keep our training material up to date with product development at BC, I missed having definitive goals. When you’re troubleshooting a technical issue or building a system it’s usually pretty easy to know if you’ve been successful: the thing works or it doesn’t. However, in a people-focused role like Learning & Development, measuring your success is a bit trickier and goals can get fuzzy.

I determined to pivot back into a technical role when one of the managers in the growing Professional Services org recommended that I apply for the open Solutions Architect position. I applied and interviewed knowing that I didn’t have much experience in that world. I didn’t get the Architect role, but they apparently saw something promising and I ended up accepting a junior role as Solutions Analyst. After a little over a year of scoping projects, documenting requirements, analyzing tech specs, designing solutions, and supporting systems integrators and agency partners, I earned a promotion to Solutions Architect.

What’s important about a problem that BigCommerce is solving?

BigCommerce enables merchants and agencies to use the best tool for the job.

BigCommerce is an incredibly powerful ecommerce platform, and by itself, BC can meet the operational needs of many merchants, especially in the SMB space. With that said, BigCommerce recognizes that we’re not and never will be the one ring to rule them all. In many cases, like managing sophisticated fulfillment operations or aggregating customer data from several systems, there are better tools for the job.

That’s where our openness and flexibility are key — if you don’t want to manage your orders from the BigCommerce control panel, you don’t have to. You can use an existing integration or build bespoke solutions to consume the data that BC generates, then synchronize updates from your other systems back into BC. That wasn’t always the case. When I joined the company 8 years ago, we were just planting the seeds of a technology ecosystem. Back then, many (maybe most) of the things that you could do on the storefront or control panel weren’t exposed by an API. Today we develop features with an API-first approach and almost anything that a human can do in the control panel or on the storefront an application can do with an API. That gives merchants and agencies the flexibility they need to use BC where it’s the best tool for the job, and to use something else when it’s appropriate.

What projects are you passionate about working on at BigCommerce?

First, I want to complain for a second about the word “passionate”. Let’s face it: this is a job. It’s not always fun and I’m not necessarily passionate about it. I’m passionate about my family, good chorizo, sick bass lines, and violent mosh pits. But, sometimes I do enjoy my job even if I’m not particularly passionate about it.

Lately, I’ve been really enjoying exploring the ways that BigCommerce can be used as the ecommerce engine in a JAMstack architecture. When you feed catalog data into a flexible CMS, render content with a modern framework, personalize it with a purpose-built personalization engine, and deliver it all in a flash from your CDN’s edge, then you can create some truly impressive shopping experiences backed by a powerful ecommerce engine that handles pricing, promotions, carts, and checkout. I feel like we’re really just starting to see the technology ecosystem come into its own and I look forward to seeing where we (at BC, the developer community, and the ecommerce industry as a whole) can take it from here.

How do you approach learning something new?

1. Make sure the thing I want to learn is actually the thing I want to learn:
   If I want to learn something new, it’s probably to solve a problem. But, it’s very easy to mistakenly believe that a thing will solve a problem when you don’t yet understand how to use or do the thing. So, I like to spend some time learning about why the thing is around and how other people use it to solve problems.
2. Do the thing:
   Sure, watch a tutorial video or read a quick start guide, but then just get your hands dirty and do the thing. Do it repeatedly. Find other problems that you can solve with the thing and set about solving them. If I don’t have the time or energy to do the thing, then it’s probably not as important as I thought it would be.

What’s the best career advice you’ve been given?

Never turn down a free lunch.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Practice (something other than stringed instruments).

You can’t be good at everything. And, without practicing, you won’t be good at anything. Stop trying to learn all the things and just start doing the things. If you want to improve, then do the things over and over again. You’ll learn more from doing than you ever could from reading.

And, there is no shame in googling syntax.

What have you learned about yourself on this journey?

I grow and thrive best when put into novel and challenging situations. My blood pressure and anxiety levels will probably be elevated at first, but in most cases, I’ll come out of it with some new skills (and maybe some new scars).

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

A garbage man. Riding on the back of the truck looked like a lot of fun to a five-year-old boy.

We’d like to thank Patrick for sharing his time with us and giving us a look into his day-to-day life at BigCommerce. Have a question for Patrick? Leave a comment below! 😊