Hire Me

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

I’m looking for a non-management technical leadership position. I am driven to build things, and I found my experience managing people unsatisfying.

  • Flexible on languages, though especially interested in TypeScript, Rust, Python, and Go.
  • Want to work closely with other engineers: I believe teams succeed when members support each other and grow together.
  • Enjoy code review and mentoring.

Work experience

2026 to present — GoodGesture — Lead Developer (volunteer)

  • Joined a mutual-aid app connecting people with needs to people with resources, with no prior React Native, Expo, or Firebase experience; ramped up quickly enough to become lead developer.
  • Own the most complex technical work and onboard volunteer contributors with unpredictable availability.
  • Built the sign-up and photo-upload flows, coordinating multiple Firebase services (Auth, Firestore, Storage) without race conditions.
  • Currently building location-based matching that never stores a user’s exact location, and merging the mobile and web apps onto a shared backend.

2019 to present — Open source contributions

After leaving Puppet, I took a few years to find an effective treatment for a medical issue. Since then I’ve been contributing to open source (described below) while looking for my next position.

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

As an individual contributor:

  • Managed Puppet’s internal infrastructure (hundreds of hosts) using Puppet itself — including public-facing services like the company website.
  • Paid down a decade of accumulated tech debt in the infrastructure codebase while keeping it running for the team.
  • Built internal tooling for the SRE team and its clients: an automatic GitHub mirror (Python), OpenStack management tools, and an automatic server inventory system (Ruby).

As manager:

  • Transitioned the team’s scope to exclusively managing engineering infrastructure.
  • Led “Customer 0” initiative: improved our tooling, process, and the product itself via feedback. Initially product upgrades could take weeks of work; when I left we could safely upgrade to a new release the same day it shipped, letting us assure customers that Puppet was easy to upgrade.
  • Infrastructure reliability improved enough that we were able to eliminate overnight on-call.
  • Grew the team from individuals working independently into a focused, collaborative unit.

2007 to 2014 — Contractor

  • Began as a 1099 subcontractor working exclusively for a friend’s small company until about 2010, then transitioned to working directly with clients.
  • Helped clients define the right requirements and make the right trade-offs, often by providing an outside perspective on what was and wasn’t necessary — for example, evaluated on-site product review options for an e-commerce client and built a tightly scoped custom system instead of buying a SaaS product, saving them more than $10,000 a year.
  • Worked across the full stack on typical engagements: PHP or Ruby backends on MySQL or PostgreSQL, server-rendered frontends with JavaScript/CSS interactivity, database schema design, and server configuration.
  • Built supporting tools as needed, including an importer for a single 20,000-product XML file and a web crawler that scraped car listings from dealer websites.

2001 to 2006 — Verinform — Software Engineer

  • Early employee at Verinform, a startup building web software for teaching hospitals (PHP/Oracle backend; raw JavaScript and CSS, predating frameworks like Prototype.js).
  • Built the application’s UI framework and a third-party scheduling software integration.
  • Redesigned a barely-used duty-hours tracking form for residents (doctors in training) after discovering how unused it was — it silently broke over a DST transition and nobody noticed for a week. Re-derived the actual requirements (most of what it collected turned out to be unnecessary), then tested the new design directly with doctors at the local teaching hospital.
  • The result was pleasant and simple enough that residents adopted it despite having no real incentive to do so — it became a major selling point for the product, and remains my proudest achievement to date.

Open source projects

See demon.horse/portfolio for a more extensive list.

  • RepoYear (github.com/danielparks/repoyear) — GitHub contribution heat-map viewer; React/TypeScript frontend, Rust/Dropshot backend generating a shared OpenAPI type contract between client and server.
  • claude-pr-review (github.com/danielparks/claude-pr-review) — GitHub Action giving Claude full PR context to review and re-review pull requests; skips redundant re-reviews via diff comparison and batches comments into a single grouped review.
  • yanki (github.com/danielparks/yanki) — Python CLI that builds video flashcard decks from YouTube clips for Anki or a static web UI; parallelizes ffmpeg encoding with asyncio to process thousands of clips quickly.
  • git-status-vars (github.com/danielparks/git-status-vars) — Rust CLI using libgit2 to summarize git repo state into shell variables for a prompt, roughly 3x faster than the equivalent git calls.