Goessel, Kansas, United States
Hands-on technologist and proven leader with a track record of success completing high-quality technical projects, bootstrapping projects and teams, developing and executing corporate strategy including product launches and mergers/acquisitions, and turning around troubled situations. I love solving challenging, interesting, innovative, and meaningful problems of all kinds. I care about giving back, aiming to care about others at work and at home. I have extensive background in Linux/Unix environments; my projects have included operating system design and development, rapid deployment of large-scale servers, storage and virtualization buildouts, porting software to new architectures, deployment and configuration of large and small VOIP systems, writing respected technology books, management and execution of major IT projects. I'm also involved with non-profit organizations. I was chair of the Board of Trustees of the Mennonite Bethesda Society, which operates a nursing home in rural Kansas. I also volunteer with the Amateur Radio Emergency Service and SATERN, and responded to the disastrous EF5 tornado in Joplin, MO in 2011. I was president of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., which provides legal, financial, and advocacy assistance to open source software projects. I am a volunteer pilot with Angel Flight, providing medical transportation to those in need. I am also a volunteer pilot with Young Eagles, providing flights for children. I particularly enjoy working on anything difficult. I do a deep dive into new technologies (operating systems, software, programming languages, anything) and become proficient quickly. I also enjoy solving organizational and leadership puzzles, particularly with technical teams. Technical Specialties: Rust, operating systems, Haskell, VOIP, documentation, version control, git, Asterisk, Debian, Open Source, Free Software, Linux, Unix, porting, C, SSH, Exim, GPG, PGP, VPN, SIP devices, DNS. Anything difficult. Leadership Specialities: IT management, budgeting, project management, estimation, leadership, communications, test-driven development, hiring, mentoring, organization vision-setting.
MongoDB's Atlas is the only globally distributed multi-cloud database system, and the Fabric SRE team, which I lead, manages the networking for Atlas at scale across the many regions of three cloud providers.
Past and present duties as a volunteer developer for the Debian GNU/Linux project have included being a member of the testing team for release 1.3, maintaining and integrating over two dozen packages for Debian, bootstrapping the Debian port to the x86-64 architecture, and other aspects of the ports to the SPARC, Alpha, and PowerPC architectures. The work I do involves C, Perl, Python, Haskell, Makefiles, and shell scripting.
Google Cloud Platform powers critical applications for companies worldwide. I work with our global load balancers, which handle, terminate, and route incoming traffic at massive scale. Particular focus areas have included security, encryption, and caching. Because the load balancers are Internet-facing and critical to operations, this team is "Tier 1" at Google, which has the tightest requirements for oncall globally. We write code, develop automation, improve resiliency, and add monitoring aiming to provide a highly reliable service for customers. I work closely with teams in San Francisco, Cambridge (MA), and London.
Watchful is an artificial intelligence (AI) company, a leader in streamlining machine learning (ML) to drive down costs and make it accessible to far more people. At Watchful, I work on the Rust-based backend, developing new features, parallelizing algorithms, and improving code quality, working with a team of computer and data scientists.
Fastly pushes the envelope in many ways - from the latest and fastest network and hardware to innovations in software and core networking. Fastly handles traffic for some of the most well-known Internet sites in the world. STAFF ENGINEER (promoted April 2021) SENIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPER (April 2019 - April 2021) In these roles, I worked on the software at the very core of our business. It was written C, and integrates deeply with the operating system, network stack, and many other components. Both performance-sensitive and highly critical to the company, it requires the kind of detailed experience, tenacity, and carefully-thought-out programming that I enjoy. I've implemented improvements to reliability, testing, monitoring/visibility, and our complex storage subsystem. More recently, I was involved in adding Rust to the core of our ecosystem, writing code that leverages its consistency, security, and memory-management features, plus the async/await additions. I took the lead on the architecture and development of clustering with this, which was responsible for tens of millions of dollars in revenue. As with the C software, the Rust code must be globally scalable, highly performant, correct, and secure. SENIOR SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER (June 2017 - April 2019) I've written code to generate PXE-bootable images with diagnostic tools, tools to validate if an OS and its hardware are ready to enter production, automated the low-level and granular tracking of current and prior hardware inventory to assist global debugging analysis, and various projects at the lowest level of the operating system. I planned and executed OS upgrades across our global production fleet. I also re-architected the repository that holds our production binaries for our global fleet, implementing a new system, and successfully managing the technical and operational aspects of migrating the company to the new tool.