My Career¶
Two decades of engineering leadership, from hands-on coding to scaling teams and systems. Case studies, war stories, and lessons learned.
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From the factory floor to distributed systems and platform engineering -- how I became a software engineer.
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Moving business logic out of stored procedures and into asynchronous application-tier processing to achieve a dramatic throughput improvement.
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Kafka/Cassandra Ingestion Pipeline
Designing a data ingestion pipeline for 40,000+ IoT devices using Go, Kafka, and Cassandra, with practical approaches to backpressure, data loss prevention, and schema evolution.
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Architecting a CQRS-based integration using Azure Service Bus for command processing with GraphQL read models, and navigating eventual consistency challenges.
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Identity Platform Improvements
Taking a custom identity provider from 99.7% to 99.995% uptime by systematically addressing ingress failures, capacity saturation, deployment disruptions, and silent failures.
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Introducing Go to a .NET Organization
Getting buy-in and managing risk when adding Go to a .NET shop, using a pilot project approach and social proof from a respected skeptic.
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Consolidating Three Siloed Teams
Merging three siloed teams into one platform org through patient listening, structural changes, and eventually raising standards.
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A team-driven hiring process focused on problem-solving ability and communication over specific technical expertise.
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Scaling While Maintaining Quality and Culture
Tripling a team's size while improving quality through deliberate sequencing: listen first, unify, raise standards, then grow.
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Engineering leader with 20+ years building production-grade distributed systems and developer platforms.