We’re very pleased to welcome our latest team member, Marco Cabrera to team RTV. Marco comes to RTV with just over 22 years of programming expertise and was ironically one of the first programmers to work on Virtual Tour Builder 1.0 in 1999 while employed at Knorr Marketing. With three full-time software engineers now assisting RTV’s Technology Director Tom Barrons, virtual tour software and system updates will be more frequent and occur faster. Marco’s first project is to help the team wrap up photography job scheduling and payment collection before turning the attention to enabling RTV’s Edge Marketing Center, Fusion Live and Fusion Sync. These three new milestones are some of the most heavily requested features being made by RTV’s vast network of real estate photographers, virtual tour providers, and aerial drone pilots. Development on these new items is expected to begin in mid to late June or early July. Here’s a little snippet that Marco provided us about himself:

While I have traveled a bit, I grew up right here in Traverse City, MI. I love this city more than almost anywhere in the world, but I was a bit flummoxed in 1999 when I found myself looking for a tech job. There weren’t many places in town working in tech, and even fewer that would take their chances on a new developer with hardly a year’s experience. But I found a position with Knorr. One of the two projects that I was responsible for was a very new company called Real Tour Vision. It was a great position, and I learned a fair bit about what makes a successful software engineer. Working with Jason LaVanture back then taught me that there were plenty of challenges out there that needed to be solved and that we could be the ones to do it. I learned to challenge the boundaries of what the internet could do in order to support this fascinating technology.

In 2002, I moved from Traverse City to Detroit, MI, to go to school and be with Claire, the woman who is now my wife of almost 16 years. From the “big city” I made all sorts of connections and stepped into some exciting positions.

I was the Lead Developer for the web department at Wayne State University. There, I was part of a small team that took our entire website, which was hand-coded, and moved it toward an internally constructed CMS. We also started offering web services to the entirety of the university.

I ran my own business where I built complex reporting systems for Kraft Foods and reconstructed the software that managed the firing lines and systems for Commercial Steel Heat Treating. I also helped several smaller businesses that needed some assistance with their web presence.

From there, I became a Software Engineer with CU Solutions Group. Here I worked closely with another developer to recreate their software which we designed to help HR departments and staff evaluate ongoing performance and help all aspects of a company grow. In my time here, I transitioned to a Senior, then to a Lead Software Engineer. Finally, I lead teams with the new front-end technologies of Angular and Vue, while also aiding in the backend and databases.

After working for CU Solutions Group, I accepted a few positions where I learned the means of starting with a monolithic application and breaking it down into small and maintainable pieces. I extensively learned about cloud architecture, creating training programs for team members, team-building with Lunch-n-Learn style events, agile processes, and how to work efficiently with a team of other software engineers.

My career has carried two fundamental consistencies:

1 – I refuse to hear that something is impossible.
2 – I love to teach and learn from the team around me.

My family (now with our two children, Matthew, and Alyx) moved back to Traverse City and have found a beautiful life here. I am so pleased to see that an old friend, and a great company, is still here and going strong. I am looking forward to being the Software Architect for RTV and helping us all grow together. Get ready RTV, we have some huge plans, and we will never stop supporting our customers so they can dominate.

RTV, Inc

Virtual Tour Software & Real Estate Photography System

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