My Resume

This is all the stuff I've done

I’ve worked in a ton of tiny startups and a few big companies. In my career, I’ve built websites for Fortune 50 companies, worked at more than a handful of tech startups, built several products from the ground up, architected microservice architectures, and led teams to greatness.

You can find out (much) more about stuff I’ve gotten done and what I can do below.

My Experience

My work history includes some big names and a few not-so-big names, but overall shows a flexibility and an ability to deliver excellence on a huge variety of teams, to work with a diversity of people and personalities.

Engineering Generalist :: Eighty-Eight Hustles LLC

February 2020 ~ Present

I’ve been inventing little electronic devices like the Canary status light and writing a variety of video games for mobile and PC.

Details

  • Invented, designed, and engineered several consumer electronics and Internet-of-Things products, from inception all the way to preparing designs for manufacturing.
  • Read and deciphered dozens of hardware datasheets.
  • Also designed hardware testing/programming jigs for each product, to speed manufacturing and assure quality.
  • Authored all firmware for these devices, primarily in C++.
  • Designed the physical hardware, circuit boards, and plastic enclosures for several products.
  • Designed and built several sequencers, filters, and other musical equipment.
  • Built mobile apps for iOS and Android, including several games.

Technologies Used

C/C++, cmake, ESP-IDF, Typescript, React Native, Swift (iOS app), Java (Android), assembly language, Ruby, bash, CAD (FreeCAD and KiCAD), and probably several more I’m forgetting.


Staff Engineer :: Frederick/Booker/MINDBODY

July 2016 ~ February 2020

I was initially hired by a company called Frederick, shortly after it was acquired by another company, Booker. This was later acquired by Mindbody, which was then acquired by Vista Equity Partners. At Frederick I was involved in the initial architectural discussions around major products that are now in use by tens of thousands of small to medium businesses. I authored the first git commit on over a dozen different microservices, libraries, internal tools, and standalone services, all of which continue to be used by teams across the whole company.

As the engineering team expanded and separated into smaller, more focused teams, I took on the role of my team’s scrummaster in addition to still actively working on software projects. I led several projects from their inceptions to maintaining and improving them years after their adoption.

Details

  • Architected and built a bespoke CRM system, from scratch, which was then used by several other Frederick, Booker and then Mindbody services. This involved making a number of improvements to the open source Ruby library Arel and going elbows-deep into some pretty hairy SQL code.
  • Executed a massive rearchitecting and rewriting of the frontend of the Frederick web app, replacing an antiquated Backbone-based app with a modern React-based one.
  • Led a team focused on synchronizing data between Frederick and Mindbody systems, consuming Mindbody APIs, and translating data between different systems.
  • Mentored many upcoming engineers both as a team leader and through the company’s mentorship program.
  • Acted as Open Source Liaison for Frederick, being the point person for contact on all of our open-source projects, as well as outreach to other open-source products.
  • Represented the San Francisco office in the company’s Equality Diversity & Inclusivity (EDI) organization.
  • Actively participated in the recruiting and interviewing process to expand the engineering team over 200% in a year.

Technologies Used

Ruby, Go, Typescript, Node.js, React, SCSS, SQL


Staff Engineer :: Instructure (Canvas)

January 2015 ~ April 2016

At Instructure I built software mainly concerned with translating data back and forth with student information systems (SIS) at educational institutions. Instructure’s main product, Canvas, is a learning-management system used by many universities around the world. Every school has a different system in place for grading students and tracking their progress, and I worked on the systems that connected Canvas to these SISs. It gave me a lot of valuable insight and experience interacting with a wide variety of sometimes very idiosyncratic systems.

Details

  • Built features and fixed bugs in the Canvas SIS app, which interfaced with Student Information Systems.
  • Built adapters for new Student Information Systems as needed to support expanding business to schools not using systems we already support.
  • Led important refactoring efforts to improve the reliability of the SIS interface.
  • Sped up the (gargantuan, 40+ hour) test suite over 10% as a hack week project.

Technologies used

Ruby, Go, Node.js, SQL


Principal Software Engineer :: LendSquare (now closed)

August 2013 ~ August 2014

LendSquare (now sadly no longer with us) was a crowd-funding platform where small businesses could ask their community for small loans, for example to pay for a small remodel or new kitchen equipment. As the first full-time engineer working at the company, I was responsible for managing contractors working on the codebase, ensuring code quality and providing leadership through code reviews, and building most of the features that made the product work.

Details

  • First full-time engineer and therefore in charge of building out an initial engineering team.
  • Led an engineering team that reached a maximum size of 3.
  • Participated in 500 Startups’ 10th cohort, a great experience that ultimately didn’t lead to any funding, but engendered a powerful cohesion among our scrappy little team.
  • Helped conduct user interviews to fine-tune the product in its early stages, meeting many small business owners face-to-face and getting insight into their day-to-day and how they use products marketed to them.

Technologies used

Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL


Senior Engineer :: Trunk Club

May 2012 ~ Jan 2013

Built multiple customer- and employee-facing web apps and APIs to support mobile apps while breaking apart a large, monolithic Ruby on Rails app into many microservices.

Details

  • Broke apart a large monolithic Rails app serving both customers and employees into a collection of microservices and UIs able to serve customers and employees through both web and mobile apps.
  • Worked closely with product managers and other stakeholders to build robust tools for sales and customer support.

Technologies used

Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, MongoDB, Redis


My Education

University of California Santa Cruz (2001 ~ 2005) Studies and coursework towards a BA in Computer Science.1

Self-taught in electrical/computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and embedded systems.


  1. GO SLUGS ↩︎