A professional self-summary.

README.md

Who I am

• I am a thoughtful generalist engineer.
• I value simplicity and elegance in architecture, operations, and experiences.
• I believe that the most effective teams have cultures of sustainability, respect, and trust.
• I love a quick and dirty prototype, but I believe that production software is a long game.
• I'm great at spotting architectural concerns and potential pain points in code and systems.
• I think in abstractions easily. I reason with a functional approach by default.
• I'm level-headed from the first minute of an emergency to the eighth hour of debugging a bizarre problem.
• I obsess over the details. I'm great at finding edge cases. I care about style, consistency, and simplicity.
• I think before I speak. I care about people.

What I’ve done

Most recently

I was Lead Developer at Overture.

We sought—and ultimately didn't find—our product-market fit. Most of the interesting work I did is now offline and unused, but you can watch my profile video presented by a system that I built. (No, really. It's 30 seconds long; I'll wait.)

Our largest project was a video capture and editing tool that used an iOS frontend and a "cloud"-based video processing stack.

I built a lot of prototypes, I embraced DevOps as our technology grew more complex, and I took on technical leadership as we built an engineering team.

Before that

I was a Senior Software Engineer at Jibe.

I built, maintained, supported, and scaled Jibe's SaaS Job Distribution platform from a prototype to a product servicing over 50 corporate clients and processsing over $500,000 in revenue per month.

I worked on every aspect of the product: integrations, frontends, processes, billing and analytics, deployment practices. I developed, documented, and streamlined internal processes that development, sales, operations, and client support.

How I use my skills for fun

I'm fascinated by the intersection of code and art.

• I'm currently playing with maze generation as a computer-science-based art project.
• Previously, I made electronic flowers (code) as a Valentine's Day present.
• I also made a pretty cool browser-based viewer for cellular automata. The code is here; unfortunately, I wanted to use it in a homepage redesign that I've abandoned, so I never published it on its own.

I also enjoy general silliness:

• I once gave an alert robot at Jibe a drinking problem.
• I've written some pretty bad Ruby for kicks. (I even owe an apology to Bugsnag for inspiring someone else to patch Kernel#raise in production.)
• I wrote the first OAuth library for Go, and then used it to put a 1970s multi-user UNIX-like layer on top of Twitter with talon (analogous to finger(1)) and some code to tweet whatever I put in my ~/.plan file.

What I’m looking to do next

I'm looking to grow as an engineer, a person, and a technical leader in an organization that is sustainable and supportive to its employees.

I want to:

• sharpen my skills in technical operations, backend architecture, or data engineering.
• in the right place, apply my knowledge and wisdom to technical leadership.
• work in an environment that values a thoughtful solution over a hurried one.
• enable the people around me to work better and more happily.

Some bonus specifics:

• Do you deal with writing or art? I'd love to hear more.
• I <3 Clojure, and I'd love to work in it more. Same goes for other strongly functional-style languages (long ago, I even wrote Erlang and Haskell for fun).
• I've done a lot of small projects in Go (example: the tracking service I built at Jibe), and I would be interested it in using it more and seeing how it feels at a larger scale.
• Hardware is interesting to me, but I'm a hobbyist (see the Arduino-based flowers above). I would love to hear about hardware-related opportunities that could benefit from my other skills. (Again, bonus points if it's art-related.)

jibe.md

• I created a bookmarklet-based integration with Applicant Tracking Systems to allow clients to interact the product, and a process for using a slew of scrapers to keep their data up to date.
• I integrated with posting endpoints using various techniques, including APIs, HTTP automation, browser automation, and in one extreme case, even an army of custom routers deployed around the country.
• I built a web frontend to enable clients to control and track their postings—and most of them used IE8.
• I worked with the operations and sales teams standardize and document billing practices. I relentlessly streamlined billing and reporting code.
• I implemented a service to track and report views and conversions of job posts.
• I designed a process for performing automatic batch posting, and worked with clients to implement it.
• I hired a great team to continue to support and build the product and to take on related projects.
• I obsessed over our zero-downtime deploy process and maintained development and deployment practices that resulted in the least downtime across the company's offerings.

overture.md

• I built a lot of prototypes. I put significant work into at least three web frontend prototypes (the video page linked above was one of them), as well as a prototype video processing service.
• I embraced DevOps. I kept our infrastructure as simple as sensible, but I didn't try to shoehorn a video processing stack into a high-level PaaS provider. As our needs outgrew Heroku and then ElasticBeanstalk, I built out infrastructure automation to ensure that we could run a local, VM-based environment or provision and deploy to EC2 instances with a single command.
• I took on technical leadership. I helped coordinate the engineering efforts of an iOS developer and a media scientist. I did architecture and code reviews, and I provided mentorship and debugging help. I worked closely with the founder to streamline design and development workflows, and I ran an Agile process.