I have over a decade of experience working at enterprise-focused startups.
I’ve worked on everything from cross-browser bugs to building major
features to tracking down poorly-written SQL to managing
bare-metal servers.
I believe in collaboration and a positive work environment that
forgives mistakes. I value clear communication, reproducible work, and
automation that ensures quality.
I’m entirely self-taught, picking up new skills as required. I’ve
learned about topics like internationalization, accessibility and
ARIA,
time zones and
ISO 8601,
E.164 and
NANP,
and how emoji are implemented in Unicode. I’ve also written tons of Ruby
and JavaScript, a bit less shell scripting and TypeScript, and some
PHP and SQL.
My biggest accomplishment was building a system to aggregate logs from
15–20 production servers (a mix of application, database, and storage)
into a single searchable tool. I determined our requirements, evaluated
commercial offerings, and recommended self-hosting
the Elastic stack. I
wrote a Chef cookbook that set up a secure, replicated system to extract
structured data and provided sample visualizations. I later extended the
system with
Elastic’s SIEM tools
and wrote a log-retention policy in preparation for SOC-2
certification, with automated alerts for suspicious activity.
Other notable work:
wrote an integration test suite for
the FileZilla FTP client’s UI,
making it simpler to validate changes to the company’s FTP
implementation
I was the first employee at the company, and over time I contributed to
every level of the technology stack. The leadership respected that I
didn’t want to become a manager, and instead I was trusted to work on
problems that other teams didn’t have time to address. Beginning in
2016 I set up several hours of
appointment slots
every day to pair with anyone who needed help.
Site Reliability Engineer —
I convinced my managers to let me create this role based on what I’d
learned from Google’s
SRE book. I
collaborated closely with the Platform Operations team, but my projects
were largely self-directed.
My biggest achievement was a report that examined the entire platform,
from JavaScript error rates to
AWS costs. I found we could
save > 25% of annual hosting expenses, and identified high-value
opportunities to improve application performance.
Other stuff I accomplished:
performed several dozen root-cause analyses for performance and
reliability issues
ran blameless postmortems, sometimes including upper management
from across the company
used Sumo Logic to analyze
logs from AWS CloudTrail, Ruby on Rails, the Linux
syslog, and more
wrote and shared 100+ preconfigured log searches to help others
construct advanced queries
created personal monitoring dashboards and wrote guidance for other
teams
built alerts for AWS permissions and Jenkins
pipelines
evangelized code linting with tools like
ShellCheck
wrote a tool to parse the Rails codebase and automatically tag
application requests by responsible team
built system for managing technical documentation, including
integrations with external services like GitHub, Jira, and Slack
wrote weekly reports to the engineering team reviewing anomalies,
work I completed, and interesting articles I’d read
Full stack developer —
This is when I developed a lot of the skills and knowledge I used in
the SRE role. I helped build, maintain, and refactor large
portions of the application.
reimplemented entire user authentication system
per-customer password requirements
two-factor authentication, including custom library to parse
arbitrarily-formatted phone numbers (built on top of
libphonenumber)