Hi! 👋
I love building teams to solve wicked problems.
I am a Senior Software Engineer with over twelve years of professional experience in all aspects of the software development lifecycle. This includes agile ceremonies, code reviews, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), release engineering, and more. I currently lead a team of 10 engineers developing a Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) platform.
I build scalable systems for organizations with bold missions and urgent objectives. I deeply understand how efficient continuous delivery can accelerate a product roadmap.
Beautiful DevOps is more than just bash scripting; it’s an approach to continuous delivery. While code quality and feature velocity are not the same thing, they are self-reinforcing and not in conflict.
A beautiful pipeline includes continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and post-deployment checks. Each step in the pipeline frees up more time for your developers to focus on delivering new features.
I’ve built pipelines using CircleCI, Github Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, PagerDuty, and other modern components. Once you got the approach down, it can be used to accelerate almost any software development project.
Cloud engineering is the automation of cloud configuration and services, also known as “infrastructure”. This infrastructure is simply a foundation to make your idea a reality.
I’ve built highly-available and scalable architectures for many teams in Amazon Web Services using Terraform. Terraform helps deployment environments, such as development, testing, staging, and production, achieve parity (since almost all infrastructure is automated). Ansible can be used to automate builds of your application servers.
The discipline of data engineering covers many functions, and can include data ingest, data indexing, data processing, data sharing, and data analysis.
I’ve designed, deployed, and managed petabyte-scale data architectures and pipelines using relational databases, columnar files, in-memory databases, and other modern software components.
The software applications I typically use are PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS S3, AWS SQS, AWS Lambda, and AWS Athena.
Cyber security should be more than a buzz word. Good security starts at the storage level, through the network level, and up to the application level. Protecting mission critical systems, requires expertise in each level.
I understand AES 256, multi-layer encryption, and cloud-based security schemes, such as AWS KMS and AWS IAM.
I have a deep technical understanding of DNS, TCP, UDP, TLS, and other modern networking protocols.
I know how to provide efficient guardrails to development teams, but also efficiently lead a rapid incident response when a serious mistake happens.
I’ve built web apps using modern frameworks, including Bootstrap, Angular, and React. There’s always a new framework just around the corner, but a focus on user experience is always essential.
I’ve built platforms for visualizing terabytes of satellite imagery on-demand through innovative architectures.
Storage and retrieval of Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF from AWS S3 works in many use cases. However, publishing though GeoServer is sometimes needed for integration into analytical workflows.
I’ve designed and implemented quite a few geospatial analytics platforms. These platforms are built for massive scalability on modern cloud infrastructure.
The software applications I typically use are GeoNode, GeoServer, and PostGIS.
I am currently leading a team of over 10 engineers developing a Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) platform. The platform include leading edge open source and commercial components, including Arize, Domino, Fiddler, Latent AI, and Weights & Biases.
In this role, I also supervise the management of an AWS organization with over 25 AWS accounts.
In this role, I supervised administration and security of multiple enterprise IT systems, cloud accounts, and software development tools using zero trust. I developed over 50 Terraform modules for configuring AWS services. I managed over 10 AWS accounts.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I created an API for tracking the self-reported symptoms of over 150,000 unique individuals. The data collected was then used in research for an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2019375
During the airlift from Kabul, I rapidly developed a mass messaging tool that was used to safely evacuate over 1,000 US citizens.
I developed Development/Operations (DevOps) pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) as part of a small infrastructure team for two projects. In each project, I supported development teams of about 10 application engineers.
I developed and deployed a geospatial system using PostGIS for analyzing millions of points.
At the World Food Programme (WFP), I organized a summit of developers and users of the open source GeoNode project, and supported the WFP GeoNode. GeoNode is an open source web-based spatial data infrastructure that is used in more than 50 countries world-wide to manage and share geospatial data.
During the West Africa Ebola Crisis, I deployed and managed the Ebola GeoNode that was used to share essential operational information amongst multiple response agencies, including the United Nations, Red Cross, and more.
https://odimpact.org/files/case-studies-sierra-leone.pdf
2014 : M.A. in International Politics from American University
2009 : B.S. in Computer Science from UC Davis
2009 : B.A. in Political Science from UC Davis
I haven’t presented at any public conferences since the pandemic, but look forward to future community gatherings.
In 2019, I co-organized the Free and Open Source for Geospatial, North America (FOSS4G NA) conference in beautiful San Diego, CA. The conference included over 500 participants from across North America.
In 2018, I presented at the Free and Open Source for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
In 2017, I presented at the Free and Open Source for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Boston, Massachusetts.
In 2016, I co-organized a summit of users and developers of the community open source project GeoNode at the World Food Programme (WFP) in Rome, Italy.
In 2013, I presented at the Free and Open Source For Geospatial, North America (FOSS4G NA) conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I’d love to hear about your wicked problems and see if I can help. Check out my consulting page.
I love the outdoors. Profile photo is of Old Rag Mountain at Shenandoah National Park. Background photo is of Jackson Lake and the Grand Tetons at Grand Teton National Park.