What I bring#

Along with over 10 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. More than just an individual contributor, I’m a lifelong learner, a passionate technology enthusiast, and an engineering leader.

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 began as the only employee. I performed duties well outside of my comfort zone: I acted as human resources when I posted job descriptions and held interviews, as IT when I setup on-site storage and networking infrastructure, and as the product manager and team lead when I conceptualized and created 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 also interviewed new prospects and 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.

After consulting for a few years, I decided to try going down the road of self-employment and worked with a company called MadHive as a backend engineer on their digital advertising reporting and analytics platform with petabytes of data, mostly writing APIs with Go and a lot of SQL. It was on this team that I first saw the gaps in team leadership that needed to be filled and had the confidence to take ownership and drive our team to be more productive. I was the primary voice in our sprint planning and retroactive sessions, as well as the most active contributor on my team.

As MadHive grew and the software development market dwindled in 2023, I first learned about career uncertainty after being laid off in October. As I struggled to find more, relevant contract work in the new age of artificial intelligence, I broke away from software engineering to work on myself and learn some new skills like woodworking and agriculture. The break refreshed my mental clarity and renewed my motivation, and I resumed professional software engineering in early 2024.

Most recently, I’ve been developing microservices and big data pipelines at Applied Systems, where I have again taken ownership and driven my team in the absence of a team leader, or even a manager for most of my tenure. After our first manager was let go and our temporary acting team leader went on paternity leave, I stepped up without hesitation to plan epics, organize our sprints, delegate stories, and coordinate releases (which are done after-hours on a weekly cadence) in addition to my duties as an individual contributor. I spearheaded the initiative to add service observability that was previously non-existent, completely overhauled our massive terraform state files, and completed major refactors of legacy services that were buggy and inefficient.

Today, my natural tendencies towards collaboration and curiosity have made my transition to an “AI agent manager” seamless. I spend my days thinking about system integrity, reviewing the code that I have agents write, and working on simplifying our tightly coupled microservices with dependencies across terraform, kubernetes, database migrations, and the service code itself to make it easier for agents to view problems holistically. One of the challenges with agentic development is that while AI agents are far better programmers than humans, they still don’t understand anything outside of their context and are often ignorant to the effects a change in one service can have throughout the system, so effective agentic development requires understanding and simplifying systems in a way that agents can compact so they have plenty of context to do the work they need to.

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 and Applied Systems.

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 companies worth trillions 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. With the advent of LLMs and development agents, this is twice as relevant today than it was in 2022; yes, somebody can “vibe code” their way to a working product, but it certainly won’t be cost-effective to scale and maintain that product without humans setting guardrails. As usual, I use a worst case estimate to determine cost and always have monitors set up to track how much we’re spending.