I have worked on Internet technology for two decades now. These are some of the highlights of my career:
Now I’m looking for my next play. Could it be at your organization?
I’m looking for an engineering/programming focused role where I can leverage my operational experience to build better services and/or tools. My time in operations gives me a perspective that’s not often found on the engineering side of the organization.
For the last 6 years I have been living the dream. I started my own company, learned EAGLE and Fusion 360, and started to sell mechanical keyboards. This taught me a lot, both about business and myself, and you can read more about that on my Clueboard page.
More relevant to my talents as a programmer, for the last 5 years I’ve been one of two Principals for QMK Firmware. (We use the title of Director.) During my time as Director QMK has grown into the most popular keyboard firmware, supporting more than 1500 keyboard models. Decisions I made, projects I led, and software I wrote were critical to that success. Here are a few of my accomplishments over the last 5 years:
I did all of this while trying to run my own company, sometimes spending only an hour a week on QMK. However, I felt that cultivating a healthy firmware community was a strong part of what set my company apart from other mechanical keyboard vendors.
Running a successful open source project is a unique challenge. It required me to hone my soft skills, persuading people of my vision rather than dictating. Sometimes I have to be a diplomat- helping two groups with disparate visions get along- while other times I have to make a technical decision about what direction the project will go in leaving someone to be disappointed. Managing expectations, planning for the future, communicating those plans, and updating them based on feedback have been vital tools for deescalating when conflict inevitably arises.
For 5 years I was a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer at LinkedIn. I started as an SRE for Search, Network, and Analytics supporting the ESPRESSO and Databus services. As part of my duties as SNA-SRE I was also required to be on-call for services such as Member Search, People You May Know, Jobs You May Be Interested In, and other SNA-SRE services. Later I would move over to the SRE Infrastructure team, where I helped support the Metrics Pipeline, the Salt Stack infrastructure, and other services that SRE teams depended on. While there I built a notification/escalation service that let teams define on-call schedules and escalation paths that could be activated by automation or the NOC.
For 2½ years I was the primary individual contributor on Box’s technical operation team. I helped Box grow from a single datacenter with a handful of servers to a multi-datacenter operation spanning hundreds of servers. Using off the shelf software where we could and writing software as necessary we built a technical infrastructure that was able to scale Box’s monolithic PHP app much farther than it ever should have gotten before being modularized.
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