Hire Me

My calling is building tools for humans and I’ve spent the last 17 years 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 technical leadership position. I want to contribute directly, as well as contributing indirectly by helping my colleagues advance. I believe that teams succeed when members support each other and grow together.

2015 to 2019 — Puppet — Senior SRE, Manager of Engineering

I joined the Puppet Ops team in order to build tools that my team and I used ourselves.

The tools I wrote included an automatic Github mirror in Python, tools to manage OpenStack, and an automatic server inventory system in Ruby. I helped our team move 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.

I spent a year in management as a way to explore leadership. It was extremely valuable, but I found that I missed technical work and that I preferred to support my team as an experienced coworker rather than as a manager.

2007 to 2014 — Contractor

I mostly worked on web applications and sites written in PHP and Ruby. Even when subcontracting, I worked directly 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 a 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.

I primarily wrote web application code, but many of my clients needed more help than that. I did everything from configured servers to writing CSS and slicing images to exactly match the design spec.

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