Summary

I am a polyglot developer with considerable experience in Ruby and Rails and cloud infrastructure. I excel at being a force multiplier, mentoring developers, and writing clear and useful documentation for other engineers. I am passionate about giving my teams the tools they need to develop and deliver software by creating powerful and simple development and deployment environments.

Work History

OysterHR, Remote

Tech Lead & Staff Software Engineer

September 2021 - 20 January 2023

• Designed and implemented a reproducible and identical local stack across Linux and macOS using nix, direnv, just, and supervisord
  • Single-handedly reduced new engineer onboarding time to about 2 hours
• Supported the entire engineering department with the local development environment in both Linux and macOS
• Rewrote the git-hosted markdown documentation into a complete tutorial and walkthrough to onboard new developers using Notion
• Developed policies and best practices for features across multiple teams and stakeholders, including product
• Designed complex data structures for use in all countries serviced by Oyster
• Collaborated with product owners to document feature requirements and time estimates
• Implemented features of all sizes as well as writing fixes for ad-hoc failures
• Added instrumentation to track arbitrary metrics for features and performance
• Participated in many technical interviews, resulting in hiring many new engineers including other Staff level engineers

Consolo Services / WellSky, Remote

Principal Software Architect

June 2006 - August 2021

• Founding engineer of the team; one of four initial employees
• Led product from a tiny startup of about 7 customers to over 30 M requests / month
• Led migration of the core application from pre-beta Ruby on Rails all the way to Kubernetes deployments using Helm charts first in AWS and later in GCP
• Implemented one of the most sophisticated billing systems for hospice and Medicare
• Spearheaded a platform-wide documentation project to share knowledge
• Designed benchmarks to improve system response times across the entire platform
• Committed bug fixes to vagrant, the open source development tool
• We sold the Consolo IP to WellSky in 2019 at a $50M valuation
• Contributed in some way to each of the 20+ microservices
• Fostered new developers

Performance Support, Montgomery, AL

Systems Operator

October 2004 - June 2006

• Maintained an interim Secret clearance
• Managed Department of Defense computer systems at Maxwell Air Force base
• Developed tools to automate system maintenance tasks and shift duties
  • Reduced a process from 3 hours per shift to an automated email every 15 minutes
• Administered machines running HP-UX on PA-RISC processors

Technologies

Education

Tennessee Tech University

Computer Science, B.S.

August 2001 - December 2009

Personal

• I am the cook of the house.
  • I make most meals in the house and I can also make some killer baked goods.
• I enjoy overlanding, offroading, and camping.
• My family has a farm.
  • A working farm with more than 75 animals across 8 different species.
• I do not need a gym membership: I have a farm. It is hard work, but rewarding.
• My partner grows cut flowers professionally.
• My tractor is more expensive than my truck.
• I self-host most of the services I use online (but not email).
• I enjoy playing video games.
• I learn new programming languages that seem interesting to me.
  • My favorite method is to use the Advent of Code puzzles.
• My family recently developed a shared interest in Pokemon TCG (Trading Card Game).
• My partner and I have travelled to Japan 5 times together.
  • COVID has been hard on travel, hopefully the price of the tickets will come down now that the borders are open to tourists again (2023-01-12).