Jay Shobe

Yardi

By Leah Etling on Jan 2, 2013 in People

For the last few years, Jay Shobe has had a technology to do list that would seem overwhelming by any standards. Yardi’s Vice President of Technology reeled it off for us, almost like it was a set list for a rock show.

“Mobility – and that includes Apple, and Android. JQuery and HTML5, for multiple browsers, so IE, Firefox, Chrome, Mac. Multiple screen sizes, from a monster desktop to an iPad to an iPad mini to a phone. Sharepoint. Business intelligence. Cube design.  Data warehousing.” He paused to take a breath.

“It’s been an incredible run of technology over the last two to three years. Way more than anything I had ever seen. And as always with new technology, I’m looking forward to seeing things really consolidate, and seeing all of these new technologies move forward into our different verticals.”

Jay started at Yardi as a teenager back in 1985, stuffing envelopes, copying computer disks and running errands. After he graduated from Santa Barbara High and headed to Baylor University in Texas to study history, he worked fulltime at Yardi while he was home for the summer. In 1989, he moved back to Santa Barbara and began working at Yardi in client service support.

The desire to try programming hit him a few years later.

“I think all programmers ultimately have to do their own learning. In programming, things change constantly. It doesn’t matter what you learned yesterday. You’ve got to figure out a way to adapt and learn new technologies,” Jay said. He claims to have not been much of a student in college, but when company founder and CEO Anant Yardi gave him his first programming job to complete, he threw himself into learning how to write code for the Windows-based Enterprise product, doing the work at home on his own time.

That was the beginning of a constant learning process that has never ceased. Picking up new languages and technologies is life work for any programmer, and with the rapid advancements of late, Jay and his team are constantly updating their skills in order to roll out new products, updated versions and refine existing software as fast as they can.

His favorite programming projects over the years included the transition from Enterprise to the first version of Voyager, and moving to object-oriented programming with the creation of YSI.net.  A programmer who is also a people person, Jay loves working with clients to understand their business needs and translating those requirements into functioning software applications.

A recent major challenge has been setting the standards for programming Yardi’s multiple new mobile product offerings, including Leasing Pad and many other applications. That’s meant learning two new languages – Objective C, for Apple products, and jQuery, for multi-browser webpage development.

The open source jQuery, originally authored by John Resig, is one of the recent programming innovations that Jay admires for its success as a community effort.

“Volunteers fix bugs and report bugs and suggest enhancements, and their actual code might go into a build of jQuery.  It gives you hope for humanity that there’s this almost democratic, egalitarian ideal that actually exists and actually works and is the building block of any number of real business websites,” he said.

Computer programmers might be stereotyped as quietly brilliant brainiacs, but we got a much better description of the type of personality best suited to the job from Jay.

“It’s a very creative job. It has a mathematical and scientific aspect, but there’s this other creative nature about it,” he noted. So it makes sense that when he’s not at work, you might find Jay writing music, playing the guitar, or performing  with The Adobe, a local rock band that also includes Yardi’s Chris Ulep (Vice President, Financial Systems), and Brent Hill (Project Manager, Global Solutions). Jay has released a solo album, Saginaw, and The Adobe also has a record, Old Rider, featuring many of his original songs.

Reflecting further on the programmers’ role in a successful technology company’s overall mission, Jay shared one of the many lessons he has learned from Mr. Yardi over the last 27 years: The importance of finding the right balance between technology development, release timing, and anticipated support and updates.

“Ultimately good programmers are focused on producing things and shipping things and meeting the needs of clients. Understanding the business requirements is key, and so is rapidly coming up with a solution that meets clients’ needs, is flexible enough to meet potential future needs, without being too unnecessarily complicated and elaborate. It’s that sweet spot of timing, and creativity, and thinking two steps ahead.”

Jay’s efforts have helped Yardi Systems keep that two-step edge.