Sympraxis Is Growing: A Huge Welcome to Julie Turner!

Sympraxis LogoWell, it’s official: Julie Turner (@jfj1997) will be joining me at Sympraxis in mid-May. This is very exciting news for me.

If you’ve been following me at all, you may know that I have my own little company called Sympraxis Consulting LLC. (One of the first things Julie is going to make me do is bring that Web site into the second decade of the twenty-first century!) I started it with my good friend Peter Sterpe back in 2008. Starting a business at the end of 2008 was – well – let’s call it bad timing. Pete and I had a slow go of it for a while, and he left to take a real job. I was solo for about 6 years until Pete rejoined me last year. A few months ago Pete got the opportunity to take a full time teaching role at Boston College, and I couldn’t be happier for him.

I’ve never had grand plans for Sympraxis. I wanted to go out on my own mainly to see if I could pull it off. I also was tired of “working for the man”; anyone who knows me understands that office politics and bureaucracy are not my thing – I just want to get stuff done. I was extremely lucky to have a little idea that became SPServices and that little library has opened many doors for me. It seems like it’s worked: eight years later I still love what I’m doing and I’m able to make money doing it.

Julie is someone I’ve heard about for years, mainly through my friends who worked together at Knowledge Management Associates (KMA). (As is so often the case in this busy world, KMA is no longer extent as a standalone entity, having been acquired by Sentri, and then by Polycom.) The info I heard about Julie was universally positive over the years. When people like Sadie Van Buren (@sadalit), Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000), and Mike Gilronan (@mikegil) say good things about someone, it means a lot.

There’s a strong synergy between what I love to do in the SharePoint space and what Julie loves to do. We both do a lot of client side development, we both are passionate about implementing solutions that work extremely well with an excellent user experience, we both believe in the promise of effective knowledge management driving organization performance improvement, and the list goes on and on. We don’t believe in technology just for the sake of technology; it has to solve specific business needs.

I’ve been extremely impressed by the work that Julie has done with Bob German (@bob1german) on their Widget Wrangler (WW), which is now a part of the Office Development Patterns and Practices repo (OfficeDev/PnPSamples / ww) on GitHub. The approach that Bob and Julie have taken in the WW is incredibly well-aligned with the approaches I’ve been advocating for development on SharePoint for years. Without deploying any server-side code, we can build extremely robust solutions on top of SharePoint, and the thinking Bob and Julie have done with the WW takes it even further than I’ve been able to go as a solo artist.

I expect to learn a *lot* from Julie – and I’m hoping she can learn some things from me. Julie brings server side development skills I’ve never even tried to master, and those skills complement the client side work extremely well. Need a new REST service? Julie can do that. Need an AngularJS app done fast? Julie can do that, too. In my mind, Julie is technically ambidextrous: she’s equally comfortable writing code on the server and the client. She has a reputation as being extremely fast and good. Julie is also funny, smart as a whip, and believes in a good work/life balance. Having Julie aboard will greatly expand Sympraxis’ capacity to do more of what I’ve been doing all along, and bring her highly complementary capabilities into the mix. Who could want more?

Running a small business like Sympraxis is definitely a family affair. We discussed Julie joining Sympraxis in my kitchen after she had met my wife Melanie and son Calder. I look forward to meeting Julie’s husband Ken and her awesome son Evan. Some people say that being an entrepreneur is all about sacrifice, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s going to be great to have Julie join the Sympraxis family.

Julie Turner with her husband Ken and son Evan

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11 Comments

  1. Marc, I’m so excited to see this news go live. One of my favorite things about working with Julie, and something I know your clients will appreciate, is that she’s an efficiency expert. Both at work and at home she is all about streamlining, simplifying, reducing unnecessary steps, filtering out noise, and finding the most appropriate tool for the job. She has improved my work product (and my personal life) countless times over the years and I’m psyched that you and your clients are now going to be on the JT upgrade path!

    1. @Sadie:

      I’m a little frightened by Julie’s efficiency capabilities; she may whittle me down to nothing! On the other hand, I’m already learning from her. It’s going to be fun.

      M.

  2. This is great to see. You have built an amazing business and practice. Bringing your skills together with Julie’s seems like a perfect fit to grow the business. Congratulations.

    Also, I liked the way you said being an entrepreneur does not need to be a sacrifice. As you know it’s a hard road to hoe, but it has its rewards. Being able to meet great people and work with great people are two of those rewards. I look forward to more great stuff from the growing Sympraxis family.

  3. Hey Marc… Thanks for sharing… Julie sounds like an awesome person and someone that fits well with the type of work you do. Happy to see Sympraxis growing.

  4. I’m really happy to see this move. Marc is perhaps the smartest and best person I’ve met in US. I can only imagine how amazing it will be to work with Marc. Awesome times ahead for Julie and of course for Marc :)

    Best wishes across the sea!

    Thorsten

  5. Hi Marc, congratulations for being empowered by Julie. I have seen her work and way of execution while I worked as SharePoint architect in Mizuho Bank. She has solid and fastest coding abilities and I have learnt a lot just by seeing the code she wrote. And yes the developments she did are working like champs.

    Wishing you and Julie a very successful future!!

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