"Simplicity is a necessary precondition for reliability."
- Edsger W. Dijkstra (handwritten annotation to EWD498)
About me:
I'm a Minneapolis based Software Engineering Manager and consultant. I work for Optum Technology building an ecosystem of products for developers in the healthcare industry. Our products are built "API first" with APIs/microservices written in Ruby, Java, and Go, and "serverless UIs" written in React.
I lead a team of extremely talented engineers. Together we're taking on:
- Kafka and Event Driven Architecture
- Self service API management on top of a Eureka/Zuul API gateway
- An authentication and authorization hub built on KeyCloak
- Mission critical healthcare APIs serving thousands of requests per minute
I've worked at the intersection of health care, policy, and technology since I began my career. My experience includes start ups, innovation incubators, non profits, and Fortune 10 companies. I care about building the right thing and building the right thing well. As an engineering lead it is my goal to empower my team and to create and defend the environment they need to deliver tangible results. I believe the primary job of an engineering manager is to attact and retain talent.
As a consultant I serve in one of two roles. I either operate as a catalyst taking a client's business to the next level by highlighting market and tech opportunities and pointing the way to next steps. Or, I oporate as a spark - getting an idea from hypothetical to revenue generating MVP in the shortest time possible. Either way - I move according to the principles of Lean Startup.
Before I started coding I was a double major in Physics and Philosophy at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Technologies I work with:- Languages: Ruby, PHP, GoLang, JavaScript, Bash, React
- Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL
- Markup: HTML, CSS, HAML, Bootstrap, SASS
- Frameworks: Rails, Zend Framework 2, Laravel
- Tools: RSpec, JMeter, Selenium, PHPUnit, Git/GitHub, VirtualBox, Docker, Vagrant, Chef, Ansible, Composer, Atom, Vim (and a whole lot more)
- Operating Systems: CentOS, Ubuntu, OSX, Windows
- Cloud platforms: OSE, Linode, Heroku