I'm a Software Engineer with an eclectic background. I've worked for the Prison Service (UK), done application and security architecture, security technology research, been trained in moral, political and natural philosophy and even acquired a USPA skydiving license along the way. I've lived on two continents and in three countries. All of this contributes to my unique perspective on software engineering. I have over 20 years' experience in a range of technology roles, and am always keen to work with new tools. I am a programming language nerd as time allows, but I'm also happy in the infrastructure, automating deployments or doing performance analysis. I enjoy working in small tight-knit teams and alone. I favour development projects which use lightweight processes, continuous integration and delivery for fun, profit and risk mitigation.
I am authorized to work in Canada, Germany and the UK. I am not currently authorized to work in the US, but have been in the past. I have been working remotely for over 15 years, as an employee and a freelancer for USian, Canadian and German clients.
Due to health issues I have been out of action since mid-2020. I plan to spend the next 12 months (at least) split between Toronto and Berlin, and am ideally looking for project based contracts in service of socially and politically agreeable goals, such as putting carbon into the ground or billionnaires on Mars, or any other planet.
Eventually, once my kids have finished university, I would like to retire into the life of a subsistence hacker, working for physicists, microbiologists and/or climatologists.
I have extensive experience specializing in UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, many Linux distributions including cloud favourites such as Ubuntu, Amazon Linux and CentOS. I currently use Fedora Silverblue as my desktop, though Arch is my more natural home. I also have extensive experience with Solaris unsurprisingly, and am familiar with MacOS and OpenBSD.
I have a lot of DevOps experience, managing production Solaris systems using Puppet, and more recently managing AWS deployments using Terraform and Pulumi.
I am an accomplished programmer, writing code these days primarily in Clojure. I've worked in ClojureScript, Python and Go quite recently, and am currently enamoured with Rust. I have written code for a living in Java, Ruby, Javascript (mostly Node.js), Perl and a little C.
I've designed and built application architectures involving many different kinds of connective tissue, including Kafka, Redis, Amazon Kinesis, and SQS. I've worked with various databases, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Cassandra.
I much prefer lightweight development processes, very small teams, and programming practices with short feedback cycles, including REPL based development, continuous testing or test driven design, depending on the language and context. I also prefer continuous integration and delivery. I am not religious about any particular methodology; I have found that different approaches serve different goals, technologies, tools and cultures. Except Emacs, which is a universal invariant.
Finally, my communication skills are excellent; I have made numerous presentations as a part of my work, and have presented and facilitated at software conferences (though I have no interest in doing more of this!). In previous roles I have provided ad hoc, formal and informal training to colleagues and customers. I've also trained non-technical end-users, and mentored novice web developers.
I recently moved to Berlin, where I joined Xapix as the third member of the backend team. Xapix is an integration and orchestration platform, bringing together data from heterogeneous sources, (HTTP APIs and event sources). The runtime is written in Clojure and makes heavy use of Kafka. Integration use cases dominate the product offering, but the platform is fundamentally a low code orchestration platform, capable of coordinating user supplied code written in Clojure, Javascript and Ruby with support for more languages falling out of its use of GraalVM.
The Data Guild is a hothouse for socially responsible data science projects; its members are some of smartest, kindest people I've encountered in STEM.
Motiva is a communication and relationship management platform, with ML-driven message and send time tuning. I worked on the Clojure backend components improving reliability and scalability on the first generation product, and designed and built the backend components of the new CX product.
I joined this project, a peer-to-peer marketplace for solar energy trading, when it was already underway, tasked with improving the development to deployment workflow, and stabilizing the production environment. I implemented Terraform, so that deployment environments could be spun up on demand (including VPC, ECS, ELK, scheduling, metrics collection and event alerting components), introduced continuous deployment to ECS, and wrote a bunch of tests to make that less terrifying.
Built an anomaly detection pipeline using DynaTrace, AWS Kinesis Analytics and InfluxDB.
Appcanary was a security product created by friends in Toronto. It aggregated many sources of security advisories and notified users when monitored systems were impacted. It was written in Ruby on Rails and Go. In 2018 it was acquired by Github.
Joined CircleCI in September 2014 as its first resident Canadian employee. I worked on code throughout the product, which is written mostly in Clojure and (back then) ClojureScript and deployed to AWS. CircleCI evolved quickly over the time I was there, both technically and organizationally. I helped grow CircleCI in Canada, hiring local engineers and bootstrapping a Toronto office.
I worked on the web development course, which covered Ruby (Sinatra and Rails) and JavaScript (NodeJS, JQuery, AngularJS, React). Very rewarding spare time work.
Focused on development projects in support of technical operations. Implemented time series database service using KairosDB, a Cassandra application. Lots of puppet, linux software packaging, small NodeJS tools for integration.
Technical Lead on the Circle Street project, a retailer-oriented ad platform. We used Heroku, Rails, NodeJS, MongoDB. I have since learned not to use MongoDB.
I worked in many roles during my time at Sun/Oracle. Highlights include: