I build things and push them until they break, then make them not break. That second part is what everyone keeps paying me to do — twenty-plus years of systems and reliability engineering, lately the kind where I'm also standing up the team and the practice from scratch. The first part is why I got into any of this.
What I actually love is new technology and hard limits — how small I can make something, how much load it takes before it flinches. I ran Alpine Linux as my daily desktop for years (hence the stray aports repo). The problems I like best are the ones where the obvious answer is "you can't."
I'm building the SRE and developer-experience practice at Bluebeam from the ground up — the tooling, the on-call rotations, the standards, and the team. On my own time I've gone deep on AI-assisted, spec-driven development; most of the recent repos below started as experiments in how much real software that workflow can actually ship.
I led SRE for Bitbucket at Atlassian, where I got to do some of my favorite low-level work: a Go proxy for Envoy, and rethinking a cache under heavy concurrency. For nearly eight years at LinkedIn I went from SRE manager to staff engineer, where my team built and ran the observability and tooling a whole engineering org relied on. Further back, there's a CTO stint and a decade-plus of independent consulting.
If you want the detailed history, it lives on LinkedIn.
It started with a middle-school gaming tournament and a weekend I spent learning Linux. I haven't really stopped since.
The longer version
My dad has done operations and systems architecture work for as long as I can remember — a lot of the same stuff I ended up in — and he kept me around computers and curiosity growing up. In middle school, my friends and I needed a website to sign up for a gaming tournament, and I told one of them, "I've heard of this thing called Linux that people use to make websites. I'll learn it this weekend."
A year later I was the paid web host for two local businesses. Two years after that I was building websites and e-commerce platforms from scratch, and eventually doing graphic design, running globally distributed hosting, and even a custom WHMCS wrapper for Minecraft server hosting back when that was barely a thing. The e-commerce side is where GoDaddy eventually undercut me — same product, a fraction of the price, minus the white-glove handling my customers didn't miss until the ad-hoc-change calls started. So I spent a while managing in retail and shooting photography before finding my way back into engineering at the deep end.
I came up through IRC and online communities, which is where a lot of this — the terminal habits, the optimization brain, the itch to build — comes from. One of those communities is where I ran PonyChat, an IRC network whose embeddable web client I kept online for thousands of people on a sub-gigabyte VM — held together with a hand-tuned kernel and a stubborn refusal to add more RAM.
My work at Bluebeam, Atlassian, and LinkedIn isn't public. These are — mostly things I wanted to exist, so I made them.
- spc-player · TypeScript — a SNES SPC music player, instrument explorer, and audio workstation, all in the browser.
- cpap-analyzer · TypeScript — deep, client-side analysis of ResMed CPAP therapy data; nothing leaves your machine. (There's an OSCAR-export sibling too.)
- hollow-knight-damage-tracker · TypeScript — hit and damage tracking for Hollow Knight boss fights.
- Terminus-Bot · Ruby — a scriptable IRC bot; my longest-running project, though it's been dormant since I moved off IRC.
- tesla-cli · Go — command-line control for Tesla vehicles; a leftover from a Pi-based dashcam-uploader experiment, and probably stale against today's API.
- elemental-ircd · C — a high-performance IRC daemon I used to lead; a lot of low-level C, archived since 2019.
- drag-to-resize · JavaScript — a small userscript to drag-resize images on most sites.
Languages I use most
Home turf
Mostly AWS, with some Azure and GCP. The throughline is reliability, observability, and distributed systems.
Off the terminal, I'm a sucker for audio fidelity — I built the SPC player because I wanted bit-perfect playback of the Star Fox soundtrack. Otherwise: photography, the games I grew up on, and the online communities I came up through and never quite left. 🏳️🌈
Always happy to talk shop — systems, performance, and the occasional weird optimization problem.