What I bring #

Along with over 8 years of professional software engineering experience in backend development, DevOps, and cloud architecture, I bring the obligatory computer science degree, a passion for development, and a dedication to helping my team. I’ll learn your codebase and make contributions quickly, I’ll improve current documentation, and I’ll help my team grow.

All the best developers do this, but I’m more than an excellent developer; I’m one that takes ownership without a second thought, who brings out the best in other developers, and who can shift between working with engineers, product managers, stakeholders, and customers.

Great track record #

During my career I’ve proven that I’m not just a great developer, but one that consistently takes ownership and responsibility of their services, something I’ve done in every one of my jobs.

I did this in my first ever career step when I worked for an educational gaming startup, First Mobile Education, where I was the only employee. I performed duties well outside of my comfort zone: I hired two other people, set up a NAS (network-attached storage), and I had to conceptualize and create educational games.

My next job was with another startup, Sentrant Security, and I was responsible for an ingestion service for our data pipeline. I took ownership and was entirely responsible for features and fixes, taking instruction from other members of the team to improve the value and efficiency of the service. I wrote a lot of unit tests, load tests, and profiled the performance of the service.

After Nielsen purchased Sentrant, our team moved to Toronto where I led our team’s cloud migration initiative in addition to my service ownership. I learned a ton about AWS, the services available there, and infrastructure as code, and I shared information with the team.

I then went on to work for a consulting firm called Redspace and provided devops and cloud architecture on over a dozen projects for clients such as NewsCorp, Sony, and ViacomCBS (now Paramount), I took part in interviewing new hires, and I created and presented knowledge shares about AWS and cloud development. A career highlight and premier exemplar of my engineering ability, I created a service that increases ad revenue for Paramount from scratch and scaled it to billions of requests per day. I was the solution architect, sole developer, and SRE for over a year on that project.

Most recently, I worked with a company called MadHive as a backend engineer on their reporting and analytics platform, mostly writing APIs with Go and a lot of SQL. Unsatisfied with the on-boarding process and my team’s direction and velocity, I took the initiative to increase our productivity and again took ownership.

Great for development teams #

I bring a unique energy to the teams I join; I have a relaxed demeanour and a great sense of humour, an insatiable hunger for knowledge and passion for development, and I love learning about and through other people. I intentionally bring the curiosity of a beginner everywhere because I know the value of asking questions.

I believe diverse teams are the best ways to collaborate on hard problems because we get different perspectives that we wouldn’t have otherwise. I want to learn about what you’re doing; I’m genuinely curious about and want to learn from you.

I actively look for ways to improve the development process; from improving deployment pipelines to application observability to improving documentation and testing, I love helping developers.

Great for business #

Customer service #

During my time at Redspace, I worked directly with several customers through Jira tickets and video calls, representing both Redspace and individual clients that I worked with. I continued to communicate directly with customers during my time with MadHive.

Much like with my teammates, I’m patient and kind with customers and resolve their issues as soon as possible. I’m constantly aware that I’m representing a larger entity and communicate in a measured, respectful manner.

Cost #

Cost is one of my largest considerations when designing a cloud solution, in no small part because I don’t want to give Amazon any more money. I’m extremely conscious of the cost of a solution and how it scales, even more so when I am writing code that incurs cost. As usual, I use a worst case estimate to determine cost and always have monitors set up to track how much we’re spending.