I relish the depth and creativity of software engineering and take pride in my contributions to software projects. I have over a decade of experience designing and implementing robust backends that power e-commerce applications serving millions of users and tens of thousands of businesses. In the future, I aim to specialize in engineering the distributed systems that undergird web applications, and I am working on growing my expertise in this area. My greatest wish is to work in an environment where continual learning and collaboration foster the creation of great software and cultivate my growth as an engineer.

Building large and middle-sized backend systems written in Ruby is the most significant part of my experience to date. To a lesser extent, I have worked on the frontend with React, but I'm excited to do more of that in the future too. I construe the backend as the source of truth by how it conveys well-expressed concepts in the business domain and circumscribes well-behaved client applications. A lucid example of this from my work at Leafly was the real-time infrastructure that supported various features in our admin order dashboard.

Software systems develop within constraints along social and technical axes. On the social axis, structured and proactive communication and documentation keep a system and its operators in alignment over its lifetime. On the technical axis, an iterative approach to development allows an organization to adapt to an environment of constrained resources and to accommodate ever more use cases and elaborations of the business. My biggest project at Leafly, an integration platform that communicated with many dozen external point-of-sale systems, perfectly speaks to this nature of developing and operating a mature, large-scale software system with a large group of sophisticated stakeholders. In particular, the highly modular data ingestion pipeline at the heart of that system was well-suited to meet this vision.

A few themes concerning the environment at a company would excite me about the prospect of working there. First, I appreciate a focus on mentoring, collective learning, and striving for technical excellence. Teaching is an essential practice for an engineering team. Teaching junior engineers my thought process and philosophy while writing code and designing systems was one of the most fulfilling aspects of my past work. I also love thinking deeply about system architecture, participating in high-level planning discussions, and tackling technical sequencing challenges. This inclination was critical at Leafly, where I helped with efforts to migrate away from generations of legacy technology.

Finally, my favorite thing is learning, and I appreciate an environment that encourages engineers to do so. I spend some time outside work now studying functional programming, category theory, and distributed systems. And I aspire to contribute to more open-source projects and pursue side projects.

Skills

Languages

Expert

• Ruby

Novice

• TypeScript
• Python
• Elixir
• Rust
• Elm

Frameworks

Expert

• Ruby on Rails
• Sidekiq

Novice

• Phoenix
• React

Databases

Expert

• SQL

Novice

• Redis
• Elasticsearch

Infrastructure

Novice

• AWS
• Kubernetes
• Datadog

Tools

• TDD
• Git & GitHub
• Jira
• Confluence
• Agile