about

I’m a programmer who lives in Fort Collins, CO.

Here’s some of the things I’ve done.

Mailchimp (2017-2021)

I was a Principal Engineer at Mailchimp. Among other things, I built a high-volume CDN log pipeline, helped build a nightly ETL process to pull hundreds of TiBs of data from hundreds of thousands of MySQL servers, worked on cloud and SOA strategy, migrated our image gallery and its contents from S3/CloudFront to GCS/Cloud CDN, designed and helped implement a whole-company analytics event pipeline ecosystem, helped shape engineering leadership processes, and coached a bunch of really great people.

Skyliner (2016-2017)

I co-founded Skyliner with Marc Hedlund and Dan McKinley and we built a lovely application platform for AWS in Clojure. Our seed round ran out before we could get much traction, plus AWS came out with a much worse competitor service. RIP.

Stripe (2014-2016)

At Stripe I worked on internal financial analytics, shipped the first Go service (a logo color analyzer for Checkout), worked on a prototype service platform for AWS, learned why you shouldn’t use DynamoDB, and ported the main codebase from a callback-based Event Machine framework to standard Rack.

Yammer (2010-2013)

I was hire 30-something at Yammer. I built their first real-time message delivery service on Scala and CometD. I wrote and open-sourced Dropwizard and Metrics. I helped write a Riak-based service for storing notifications. I helped design and implement a BerkeleyDB JE-based distributed database thingy which stored all of the materialized message feeds. We were eventually acquired by Microsoft, which was a total trip.

Wesabe (2006-2009)

I was the second full-time hire at Wesabe. I worked on the main Rails codebase, shipped some awesome features (badges! forums!), learned a lot about programming, business, money, time zones, character sets, and more. Re-wrote a bunch of the analytics driving account visualization in Java. Wrote a GPG-based document storage system which never went live but did make it into a Velocity talk well after Wesabe went out of business.