Hire Me

My calling is building tools for humans and I’ve spent the last two decades doing exactly that.

I have extensive experience taking projects from conception to production. I spent years helping small businesses define and build web applications and tools. I’ve both built applications from the ground up and added features to old, hairy codebases. I know when to go fast and dirty, and when to go slow and clean.

I’m looking for a non-management technical leadership position. I’m flexible about what languages are involved, but I’m particularly interested in writing Rust, Python, Go, or JavaScript. I hope to work closely with other engineers — I believe that teams succeed when members support each other and grow together.

2015 to 2019 — Puppet — Senior Software Engineer, Manager of Engineering

I joined the Puppet SRE team to build tools for the team and their clients. Notable projects included an automatic GitHub mirror in Python, tools to manage OpenStack, and an automatic server inventory system in Ruby.

As a manager, I helped my team grow from a group of individuals working on their own projects into a focussed team. In addition, I managed vendors, improved our agile process, and significantly reduced our on call burden.

2007 to 2014 — Contractor

I worked with clients to define the right requirements and make the right trade-offs. Often clients needed an outside perspective to see what was and wasn’t necessary.

For example, I worked with an e-commerce client to evaluate applications for on-site product review. We chose to build a tightly scoped, custom review system which saved them more than $10,000 a year compared to a SaaS solution.

A typical project involved a PHP or Ruby backend on top of a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. Frontends were primarily rendered server-side, but generally had interactive functionality implemented in Javascript and CSS. I worked extensively on all parts of the stack, from writing CSS and slicing images to designing database schemas and configuring servers.

I also built related tools, such as an importer for a single massive XML file containing 20,000 products, and a web crawler that scraped car ads from dealer web sites.