I have over 10 years experience building software and engineering teams for the cloud. I have had the opportunity to touch upon most aspects of building software services — from architecting private clouds to full-stack web application development to product design.
I first started building software as a service professionally at ThousandEyes (now part of Cisco). After having built the backend data collection software for our first product (in C++), it became clear that the web application was our biggest bottleneck, so I offered to help. As a result, I built a significant portion of the web application for our first product and ended up leading our whole engineering team. My team and I designed and built the core platform that the ThousandEyes product is based on.
Throughout this time, the company was still small, and we were all wearing many hats. Which is how, despite my main focus being the web application, I ended up spending one Christmas Day at a local data center dealing with a failure in a critical database server (more fun than it sounds, at least once we managed to convince the security guard to let me on to the right floor).
Site reliability grew to be a large team at ThousandEyes. As a monitoring company, we felt it was important not to depend on any of the popular infrastructure providers — it wouldn't do much good if the monitoring service went down at the same time as everything else! But manually managing our infrastructure started to become a burden as the business grew. So we built for scale by deploying our own private cloud based on open-source technology.
In 2018, I joined rideOS (now part of Gopuff), where I also led the development of our web application. My team and I moved our React codebase to TypeScript and turned a prototype into production software. I even made some contributions to our iOS app. But I am most proud of the role I served as an advisor to the founders, helping with software-as-a-service business strategy, building the team, scaling the product, and supporting customers.
My next role was at Swarm (now part of SpaceX). Though the company was around 20 employees when I joined, there were only three of us on the cloud software team. So it fell solely on me to design and build a new React-and-TypeScript-based web application from scratch. This web application serves as the gateway for customers to interact with Swarm’s low-cost satellite network.
Today, I use this expertise to help startups and charitable organizations alike to build software teams and products successfully.
Major relevant open-source projects (listed alphabetically):