Faces of SteelCloud: Making Compliance Easy With SteelCloud Development
As you’d imagine, it takes an entire team of programmers to turn weeks of compliance work into a simple push of a button. Simplifying complex processes for the user takes skill and more than a little knowledge of STIGs, CIS, CMMC and more. And at SteelCloud the Development Manager that guides them all is Jamie McCoard.
For more than three years (and a dozen quarterly STIG updates) her creativity, communication, problem-solving and organization skills have not only driven ConfigOS Command Center forward, but they have also managed the development of SteelCloud’s new ConfigOS MPO. We sat down with Jamie and asked a few questions about her role at SteelCloud.
What is it about programming that got you interested in this career?
It was a born instinct. When I was young, my father bought a Commodore 64. A magazine came every month with programming code you could try. So I would play with the codes, see how they worked and experimented with ways I could change them. As a middle child, I think I’m naturally a problem-solver, which is key for programming and troubleshooting. Plus, I like to create tangible items—I write, I do woodworking and have a 3-D printer. Essentially, programming and development aligns with my personality, my upbringing and my passion. It’s who I am.
What’s one of the challenges you frequently face and how do you address it?
To one degree or another, every programmer has to deal with competing requirements. The customer’s perspective is different from support’s, and that is different from the stakeholders’, which may be different from your own. It’s your job to find a common solution for the product. So you look at the level of effort a change takes, its feasibility and how it falls in your order of priority. Some things just can’t be done. Others are brilliant improvements. It’s up to me to iron all that out in features and functionality that serve everyone—and the product—well.
Are you working on anything fun right now?
Working on ConfigOS MPO has been a blast. I love to create new features and products and MPO is letting me be my most creative. We’ve recently completed something we are calling the Rapid Policy Debugger. It can isolate controls within a policy and run a remediation just on that subset of controls. So, if you want to know where apps are breaking, you can just STIG part of the policy to narrow down where the problem lies. The way we’ve approached this is different than anything else you’ve seen. It can reduce your policy debugging time by 75%. This kind of thing excites me. It makes me WANT to work nights and weekends, even though I don’t have to. This is my idea of fun.
What do you like best about working at SteelCloud?
It feels like a family here. I feel like I belong here and am respected and included. There’s a culture of closeness and respect and appreciation for one another. And I love my development team. Each person has a special role, and the team is very balanced and cohesive. We have our own collaboration space where we get together to hash things out. We are just treated really well. Another thing I like is the level of collaboration our team has with QA. We work directly with them and have a comfort level that allows everyone to bring up thoughts and ideas. By collaborating directly, it’s better for the product’s quality, functionality and features, and it also saves time in development.
When Jamie is not at SteelCloud, you can find her playing video games, woodworking, reading or just spending time with her husband, dog, cats and two children. She has a son who is in high school. Her daughter also works at SteelCloud as a QA tester. Like Jamie, she is lauded for her attention to detail and, clearly, was born to technology.
