Need a Reference Check on Richie Rump? Here You Go.

So your company read my post about 5 reasons you should hire Richie Rump, and you checked out his web site and his LinkedIn. Now, your HR department wants to do a reference check with me. Alright, let’s get it over with!

Would you hire him again?

Absolutely yes, full stop.

More than that, I’d also freely recommend him to anyone else, publicly. Nobody’s forcing me to do blog posts like this, but I think Richie’s awesome and I wanna sing it from the rooftops.

How much supervision does he need?

I’m a terrible manager. I tell Richie what the finish line looks like, and I tell him to check in with me whenever he’s hit a blocker or needs an executive decision, but otherwise he’s on his own to design, build, test, and deploy things all the way through to production.

He doesn’t need supervision, but he responds very well to input when I have it, like if I want changes to an app.

What kinds of problems is he best at?

He’s really good at architecting how data should be pulled out, translated, stored, and pushed into other systems. He’s also good at making those processes be dynamically data driven.

For example, when I asked him for a utility to get me data out of customers’ SQL Servers and into an Excel spreadsheet, he built it in a way that it’s managed via a JSON file. I can edit that file, changing what data I get from customer servers and into the spreadsheets, without having to get him involved.

He’s not just a developer: he’s an architect, and the stuff he’s built really proves that out.

How does he handle disagreements?

He lays out his reasonings for the conclusion he arrived at, and wants to know my reasonings for my conclusion. We air it all out, and if there’s anything left, I either empower him to choose (since he’s the one who has to build it), or if it’s something I care passionately about, I lay down the law and he says sure. Neither of us take technology decisions personally because after all, it’s really hard to predict the future in tech, and it’s hard to know what technique or platform is going to prove more successful.

How does he respond when production breaks?

He owns it.

He’s very diligent about putting in the right instrumentation from the start, so that things are easy for him to troubleshoot down the road. When things have gone bump in the night, he’s worked (without me asking) on weekends, on the road at soccer games, or even when he’s supposed to be on vacation.

Thankfully, he builds really reliable stuff, so those things don’t happen often! (And if you’ve got the kind of shop where you build a lot of UNreliable stuff that breaks all the time and you wanna put him on call, uh… maybe close this browser tab. Ooo look, a squirrel!

What kind of company should not hire him?

Companies that don’t want to keep taking a fresh look at what’s being done, and why. He’s really good at asking business questions like, “What’s the value of this? Why are we doing it? What’s the pain this is trying to solve?” and then adapting his work and spec to match the real underlying pain point.

What is the biggest project you trusted him with?

We (and by we I mean he) built out a database monitoring app deployed on over 4,000 SQL Servers worldwide, processing terabytes of raw data per month. We had zero support calls where we had to connect to someone’s server.

We also had to do all of that on a small-company budget, keeping cloud hosting and processing costs low, keeping email deliverability high, and keeping it all secure.

What is his most underrated skill?

A really good architect can:

• Keep designing and shipping new stuff every year
• Not have to get distracted with oops-emergency outages when the old stuff breaks unexpectedly
• Be able to pick up the old stuff, make changes to it, and have it go live without breaking things

I don’t think companies consider that often enough. Richie architects quality stuff that can last for a decade, like a quality engineer or bridge-builder, and keep growing the company’s portfolio of tools without just piling up technical debt.

You should check out his web site and his LinkedIn, and then email him at jorriss@gmail.com to set up a call to discuss how he could help.

Update 2026/07/30 – he landed at Straight Path. Congratulations to Mike, Richie, and everyone involved, and I’m excited to see what they build together.