Interview With Rockstar Programmer James Cropcho

March 23rd, 2015

James Cropcho is a highly sought-after “10x-level” programmer who was highlighted in the BBC News’ recent feature on 10x Management. In 2007, Cropcho was a member of the two-person team which uncovered the first wide-scale e-voting breach in American history, and was featured on National Public Radio. 

Based in NYC, Cropcho started programming in the third grade, and now specializes in rapidly creating Ruby on Rails-based applications for early-stage startups. He’s been building software applications – and companies around those applications – for over a decade, having held founder, co-founder and first-hire roles at startups in a variety of industries. He is the creator of the MongoDB schema analyzer Variety, which was featured on the official MongoDB blog in 2012.

In this video interview with Major League Hacking‘s co-founder, Jonathan Gottfried, Cropcho discusses his experience with data security (including the 2007 e-voting breach), the difference between a “hacker” and a “cracker”, and the potential role for hackers and programmers in helping to improve digital security. If you haven’t yet, check out the BBC’s report on James and 10x: Why Computer Programmers Need Agents. Listen to his 2007 interview on NPR, here.

Interested in hiring James or another 10x’er for your tech project? Click here.