Introduction, for humans
Here's thirty years in three paragraphs.
Commodore BASIC. HyperCard. Spacer GIFs. Art school dropout. Macromedia Flash, early PHP, web standards XHTML+CSS. Then, for the past twenty years, Ruby and Rails. Conf organizer, host, speaker at Ruby and Rails Confs.
Solo projects, tiny startups, midsize companies, and Fortune 100 corporations. Contractor and full-time. Contributor, team lead, dev rel, senior software engineer. Most recently, staff engineer and engineering manager. Teams like: platform, admin and internal tools, core services, money systems.
Improving eng team and org culture. Fast tests, faster CI, frequent deploys, small moves. Ongoing legacy maintenance, latest stable language, library, system dependencies. Exemplar Ruby and Rails conventions, deleting dead code and abandoned systems. Mentorship, pair programming, automated onboarding, documentation, change RFCs, cross-team cross-department collaboration. It's about the people and relationships. Never alone, always together.
Objective
More than anything else, I help teams be the best version of themselves.
I'm searching for a place to help transform into a world class eng org.
I can do this in one of three roles, any of which I'm happy to do:
- Staff software engineer
- Senior engineer manager or director
- VP of engineering
I prefer full-time over the course multiple years,
but I'm also open to some short lived contracts if it makes sense for both of us.
Experience, for the robots
Keywords, for search engines: programmer, developer, designer, director, Ruby, Rails, HTML, hypermedia, REST APIs, engineering manager, director of engineering, VP of engineering
Hover
2019–2024
Staff software engineer
Senior engineering manager (EM)
- EM: Platform team (core Rails monolith)
- EM: EHI/commerce (startup with the startup, big bet experiment team)
- EM: Internal Tools
- EM: Billing (all things money)
- StaffEng: Foundation
- StaffEng: Core Services
- StaffEng: Money Systems (all things money, part 2)
- hover.to
Mode
2018–2019
Senior software engineer
- Platform team, backend API
- Ruby, Rails
- Developer documentation site
- mode.com/developer
Eefio
2018
Founder
- Short lived startup. A REST API for Ethereum blockchain, built in Rails
- Pivoted to a Rent-the-Runway / Netflix of comic books
Quantstamp
2018
Senior software engineer
- First developer, tiny YC startup
- Core Rails monolith, standard CRUD user etc management
- Ethereum blockchain integration to experimental software from academia with no API or documentation
- Proposed ETH.io, a REST API for Ethereum blockchain, they passed
- quantstamp.com
Happily
2017–2018
Software engineer
- Only developer, tiny bootstrapped startup
- Built onboarding system for event coordinators all over the world to sign up, get vetted, show experience and skills
- Matchmaking double-ended marketplace, of sorts
- teamhappily.com
Bloomcrush
2015
Head of engineering
- Small contracting consultancy
- Mostly a Rails shop
- Somewhere between designer, product manager, and CTO
G5
2012–2014
Engineering manager
- Built and brought full product engineering team of six
- Very heavily microservices, lots of little apps
- Ruby, Rails
- Proto-Squarespace like CMS tool
- getg5.com
Engine Yard
2011
Open source cheerleader
VMware
2011
Developer relations (DevRel)
- Launched the very infant Cloud Foundry
- cloudfoundry.org
AT&T Interactive
2010
Software engineer
- Rails monolith
- buzz.com (startup inside the big corp)
- YellowPages.com
AdReady
2008–2009
Software engineer
- Rails monolith
- First Rails job
- Bad product, great team
- My real computer science education
The before times…
1999–2008
PHP, CSS, web standards, XHTML, early blogging, early podcasting, Macromedia/Adobe Flash, the very tail end of the first dotcom bubble.
Education
Art Institute of Atlanta
1998–1999
Art school dropout
3D, multimedia, interactive web design.
Pre-college
1990s
Commodore 64c, BASIC, early web, DIY zines, HyperCard.