About Me

Professional

Most of my career so far was spent working in Seattle, usually on web applications. Unusual circumstances lead to my first specialization being in optimization, but I have worked my way up to bus number or Subject Matter Expert in a number of domains including, in mostly chronological order: http internals, internationalization, compression, CI/CD, test automation, security (auth, code signing), UX, DX, reloadable configuration, and telemetry. And somewhere in the middle there, I became a VXWorks administrator. Because ours was always busy.

I have a fairly easy time learning new things, so I often find myself doing tech selection and backstopping skill gaps on projects.

Philosophy

As a Software Engineer, my job boils down to finding repetitive, slow, tedious, and sometimes confusing tasks and translating them into code. Code never gets tired, and always avoids the same mistakes. When I think of developers ‘Working Smarter, not Harder’, I often picture developers applying these same skills to their own tasks, their own problems. And when I think of projects grinding to a halt over time, seeing mean time to bugfix creeping up and up, month after month, I mostly picture developers who are unable, or unwilling, to sharpen their saws.

Writing

I’ve had many rewarding experiences working with progressive managers and coworkers who understand many of the sorts of problems I care about. Some of my writing here are informed by those conversations and interactions, and some of my writing is transcription of my feedback to them, to peers, and to other software leaders. Some is things I only sorted out later on.

I have done extensive work in team building, and the Software Development Lifecycle, including studying under and working closely with two published authors in the Kanban space.

Much of how I think is contained in my posts about Development and DX.

But some of my writing delves into how I learned to learn. Here are a few:

• Errors Should be Reasoned About in the Frequency Domain
• Learning About Learning
• Float Glass
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes
• Branching Out

Open Source

I am a maintainer on node-config and bench-node. I frequently contributor to prom-client, and I made a tool for finding performance regressions in Node.js code, called faceoff.

Influences

These days I read as much for my own learning as I do to hunt for book recommendations for others. In the same way I often handle tool selection, it’s about pros and cons, and the preponderance or absence of footguns.

There are a number of authors I’m proud to have read when I needed to hear what they had to say, who have influenced my professional life for the better.

Personal

I am rediscovering the importance and pleasure of Going Outside. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on Permaculture, which is at its heart Systems Thinking as applied to gardening. The banner picture is one I took a long time ago at the Japanese Garden at the University of Washington Arboretum.