Curriculum vitae

Contact Info

Professional Summary

Building reliable systems, solving complex infrastructure challenges, and helping teams scale through technical leadership.

My Portfolio

An illustration of the things I excel at, and samples of how I apply myself.

The whole product, the whole lifecycle.

For any product, idea, or service, it is critical to understand the TCO of the deliverables at every step of the process. From inception and bootstrapping, to cruising altitude, to a graceful off-ramp as things come to a close.

When I helped co-found PeachTree, we had a business problem to solve. We were going to inject a custom niche piece of software into an otherwise very manual and time-consuming process that impacted the entire advertising/marketing sphere. Our offer was to save time, increase observability, and capture the increase in efficiency as revenue. This product had a limited lifecycle; our secret sauce would eventually be replicated, but the increase in profitability for the agencies we helped was real.

Down the road, I was on a team responsible for the end-of-life support for the internal operations software for a major financial firm, ATM USA. This software was used to support fleets of remote technicians, financial reporting, and fraud/compliance tools for the operations team. The business had been acquired, and the legacy software systems had been superseded by the latest (and still supported!) generation.
I was the technical lead for a multi-domain team supporting a very diverse hodgepodge of organically grown software systems. The goal was never the new and shiny, but rather to aid in the transition from being a critical load-bearing component of the business to a read-only archive in cold shutdown.

Custom problems? Custom solutions.

Sometimes we are building a tool. A hammer that will see a million swings. Sometimes we are solving a problem. We are not building a tool for an unknown future usage with ultimate flexibility; we are solving a problem we have today, today.

One of my favorite projects in this line of thought was coming up with my own interpretation of the Bhuddabrot fractal. I wrote more about that project in this other blog post: The Bhuddabrot, but the gist for today is I had a computationally expensive problem where I needed to generate and catalogue an infinite amount of data, sift through it, and reduce it down to a deliverable in a finite amount of time.
This project wasn’t ever going to be used again. There was no “second production run” – the final run was going to be >99% of the total compute cost, so I only had one shot. Going from defining the problem, then coming up with a plan of attack, and designing the elastic cloud computing solution to actually solve the problem was quite the experience.

Integrations are my jam.

Be it enabling a company to send birthday cards to their customers by connecting their CRM to their fulfillment company, or connecting the dots between stock on a shelf and a vendor supplier, I love being able to seamlessly integrate multiple different things, such that it appears they were always one piece.

One example of this is how I was able to streamline the inventory and fulfillment process for a woodworking and carpentry business. The system they had worked, but not optimally. Sometimes the craftsmen would have to substitute consumables for different variants because their preferred stock was dry. This could also manifest as a large capital investment into a product that could easily be purchased within an aligned schedule, freeing that capital for current projects.
By generating an analytical dashboard that provides purchasing agents with clarity of real-time stock data, the business was then able to deliver the highest-quality product while simultaneously freeing up working capital, all during the COVID supply chain disruptions.

On time. On budget.

Not on any day in particular, but rather gradually over the course of months, the website experience of one of my employer’s clients, NCCCS, passed the point where it was painful enough to take action. The current web host was not delivering on promised performance while demanding a premium rate. The last straw was a highly visible, stakeholder-facing, business-critical bug where the issue lay in a portion of the web host’s infrastructure where we had zero observability. Their support team couldn’t help; our team couldn’t see what the problem was to attempt a fix. We could not go back to the stakeholders without a solution.

Being time to take action, the team I supported came in with a plan to migrate their website backend into AWS. Over a weekend, we designed an IaC backend to address our scalability, resilience, and observability needs. This was done at a fraction of the cost the existing vendor wanted to charge just to alleviate the performance issues. The web migration went completely without a hitch, although the results were hardly unnoticed. Immediately, the website became much more responsive, to the happy bewilderment of the people who relied on it daily.

The point isn’t always just “getting the job done”; it is stabilizing a system to the point where we can afford to take the time to observe the results before tuning the dials and iterating on the process.