Team Spotlight: Clay Shaw, Lead Software Engineer

For Clay, libraries have always been a dependable escape. In college, they were his refuge from the stressors and distraction of day-to-day life. After graduating and working in sales and business development for a number of years, Clay realized that his true calling was computers. Once he completed several coding bootcamps, he eventually found StackMap, where he could both code and pay tribute to the libraries of his college years. 

In college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so I picked the hardest route and studied finance. After several years of working in sales and business development, I decided to act upon my interest in computers and programming and enroll in several bootcamps. I studied different programming languages, different patterns of design, and a little bit of CSS. After my last class where I also worked as a teacher’s assistant, I found StackMap. I thought what they were building was really cool and that I could make an impact. 

I grew up in San Francisco and Marin County and went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. In college, libraries for me were my safe haven. That’s where I could escape my roommates to do homework or find a quiet place to relax and get away from the stress of the next test or project. In the college environment, it’s hard to get rid of the distractions of roommates, friends, and sports, so the library was the perfect place for me. It was the place where I could finally focus. It was a safe space. 

A large majority of my work has a direct impact on live production. My priority is taking care of customer work first. If things start to become larger, then perhaps it’s going to take more discussion and planning. If someone is requesting something stylistically different or just needs to figure out a way to make things work specifically with their catalog, then that takes the priority of my day.

What I like most about StackMap is the lack of significant protocols that I had gotten used to previously. When it comes to ideas, whether they’re internal or external, everything is equally shared and we can just have a large forum to discuss those ideas. Nothing is reserved for some subset of people and everyone can try to contribute and come up with ideas. I like that we have the ability to lean on each other.