Current Interests / Introduction

I’ve worked on, and love to work on, a wide variety of technologies and products. I love a challenge, and I love shipping a feature that makes life fundamentally easier for users; projects are most rewarding when they deliver increased happiness and reduced frustration to real humans. I also find mentoring new engineers especially rewarding.

In terms of technology, I’m most interested in Linux containers (e.g. Docker), Rust and Go, and serverless and containerization technologies. But for me it’s about the people and the outcomes, not the tools.

Work Experience

April 2023 - Present: Senior Software Engineer, Anchore

• Contribute to open source software, notably:
  • Syft - commits
  • Grype - commits
  • Vunnel - commits
  • Stereoscope - commits
• Features built
  • R cataloger for Syft
  • Mariner Linux vulnerability feed for Vunnel

December 2019 - April 2023: Software Development Engineer, Amazon Web Services

• Responsibilities: build highly scalable and available APIs using Java; build end-user developer tooling used by many, many teams
• Key Learnings: operational excellence - AWS teams are second to none in terms of scale and availability, and it’s a privilege to learn from them; design and delivery of broadly useful developer tooling
• Tech Stack: Java, Go, Ruby, Python, Linux containers, and of course, AWS itself

August 2018 - November 2019: Software Engineer, Pivotal (now part of VMWare Tanzu)

• Accomplishments: Test and implement features of the CloudFoundry CLI, a primary user interface to the flagship product; added ability to automatically and transparently configure backups to CloudFoundry MySQL service
• Key Learnings: detailed knowledge of Linux containers and their implementation; test-driven development; testing techniques for cross-platform CLIs and for infrastructure control planes
• Open Source contributions: CloudFoundry CLI (commits)
• Tech Stack: Go, CloudFoundry, Google Cloud Platform, MySQL automation

February 2017 - August 2018: Senior Consultant, Excella

• Accomplishments: Built user-centric, delightful web UI over complicated US Government forms (the USCIS N-400 and I-90). This included building the ReactJS front-end and Rails middle layer to provide a more manageable facade over the legacy systems of records.
• Key Learnings: delighting customers with usable and accessible software, even in a highly constrained environment; building team-scale developer tooling to support Dockerizing existing apps; working directly with clients and stakeholders to understand requirements
• Tech Stack: Ruby on Rails, React, Docker, AWS

June 2015 - February 2017: .NET Developer, The Cobalt Compmany

• Accomplishments: Built customizations to enable certification management customers to model complicated workflows and recertification rules. Fixed state-management heisenbug in custom CRM web application
• Key Learnings: Working with customers who are sensitvie to implementation cost; delivering on tight estimates; designing and maintaining reusable components so that future clients enjoy the benefit of lower implementation costs
• Tech Stack: C#, MS SQL server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

2011 - 2015: High School Teacher: Latin and English to Speakers of Other Languages

• Tech Stack: Automating parts of teaching workflow using Python and Google Apps Script
• Key Learnings: meeting the customer/user/student where they are; helping people who are new to a topic and misunderstand things

Education

• 2014: Master’s of Arts in Education, specializing in world language instruction and English to speakers of other languages, The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. This is a degree in debugging human miscommunication.
• 2009: Bachelor of Arts in Classical Studies, The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA