I’m a software engineer and technical leader with a track record of shepherding cultural and technical transformation across multiple engineering organizations. I've focused on the software development life cycle (SDLC), with particular emphasis on continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and on post-incident learning; and on leveraging system topologies to improve the effectiveness of teams.
Over the years, I've had opportunities to work on sociotechnical challenges like setting technical visions; improving incident response (IR); adopting CI/CD; increasing productivity; participating in open source projects; and improving application security. In my roles as a manager and director, I've worked with other leadership to improve clarity and equity by establishing department values, building career rubrics, and improving hiring pipelines.
I live in Brooklyn, NY. When I’m not at work, you can often find me playing shuffleboard or at a table playing D&D or another pen-and-paper RPG.
Writing
I have a blog where I sporadically write on technical topics including testing, CI/CD, project planning, evolving software. And on anything else where I feel like I have something to contribute.
I also write about TTRPGs sometimes. Fair warning: I use this blog as a place to practice editing myself less and hitting “post” faster.
Speaking
I love giving talks. Mostly I've talked about CI/CD and occasionally about topics like documentation and open source software. Below are some examples:
- The Engineer's Path(s) QueensJS, May 2020
- Zelda and the Art of Continuous Delivery QueensJS, May 2017
- The Hierarchy of Great Docs ManhattanJS, April 2017
- PIEfection ManhattanJS, Jan 2016
- Choosing an Open Source License Wisely BrooklynJS, April 2015
- Now you're thinking with Queues! ManhattanJS, April 2015
- SOA you want to be Service Oriented? QueensJS, Jan 2015
- Going Faster: Dozens of Deployments FirstMark Tech Summit, June 2013
- UX, IA, and Firefox Help: 7 Million Happy Users WriteTheDocs, April 2013
- How do I Feature Flag? NY Continuous Delivery Meetup, Dec 2012
- Mozilla’s Best Practices for Django Security DjangoCon 2012, Sept 2012
I also appeared on an episode of Software Engineering Radio discussing the CI/CD mindset and practices.
Open Source
Since around 2009, I've been an active open source contributor and maintainer, and fascinated by licensing and intellectual property. Since then, I've had the opportunity to help create policies around open source software (OSS) for a variety of teams, and to introduce new developers to the world of OSS.
I currently maintain a handful of open source Python libraries, and was the original creator and maintainer of a couple of popular ones.
- statsd
- A popular Python client for Etsy's StatsD instrumentation server.
- django-ratelimit
- A tool for limiting access to Django views.
- django-jsonview
- A compact library that makes building JSON endpoint simpler.
- django-waffle
- (Created.) Waffle is a feature flag library for Django applications.
- bleach
- (Created.) Bleach was a library for cleaning user-submitted HTML that was based on the HTML5 parsing algorithm to avoid common security issues.