I've been building things on computers for nearly thirty years.
When I was a kid, my mom took me along to her community college while she attended night classes. There was a spare computer and I followed along with the class learning to mess with WordPerfect.
By twelve I was writing BAT files, making desktop apps in Visual Basic, and building websites on Angelfire and Geocities. I accidentally wiped the family hard drive learning to dual-boot Linux and messing up the partitioning step. Ran eggdrop bots on IRC (90's EFNet was a wild place). Taught myself Perl, then PHP. Started selling websites to local businesses as a teenager.
Professionally, I've built Flash websites for auto dealerships, LAMP applications for health tech startups, and infrastructure systems processing tens of billions of events daily across hundreds of cloud accounts. I've racked physical servers in data centers, migrated enterprises to the cloud, and built APIs that orchestrate hundreds of thousands of terraform deployments a year.
I've also built the teams and organizations behind the systems. At ShapeUp I built a Sustaining Engineering team that ushered in the highest performance and stability of the platform in it's history. At Virgin Pulse I created a Platform Excellence engineering division encompassing SRE, T3, and T2 teams while overseeing SDLC processes for the 300+ engineering department. At Snowplow I grew an SRE function from a small collection of ICs into a globally distributed operation.
Along the way I roasted coffee as a side hustle using a drum roaster I enhanced with Arduino and an API.
I still have my copy of Sam's Teach Yourself HTML 4, and still live in the terminal and manage my life in plain text.
I'm currently Senior Director of Applied AI at Snowplow, where I'm leading our AI strategy and transformation.
My work now focuses on how AI changes the way we build software, run operations, structure organizations, and make decisions.
I live in an 18th century New England farmhouse with my wife, six kids, a couple of lazy goldens, fat cat, 40+ chickens, and 2 bee hives.
I write here about what I'm building and what I'm learning. You can see what I'm up to now.