After Tally, the co-founder of Tally and I discovered a shared passion for product development, blending design and engineering. We joined to create a new company to build a new product in this space. I was responsible for building two distinct products: Strings and Summon. Strings was a copy writing tool that made it easy for writers to edit copy, the text, in web and mobile apps. I was responsible for all product services and infrastructure while I hired a contractor on the front end. This product lasted only 18 months, however, as there was too much friction in giving access to application source code to our tool for the writers.

Our other product, Summon had a much larger vision as an integrated developer experience space for developers to improve their developer lifecycle. I believe that there are so many disjoint tools that compete for attention and increasing cognitive load. These tools include tools for project management, documentation, version control, pipelines, infrastructure, observability, etc. Finding the right thing at the right time is becoming counter-productive. Summon aimed to bring the right data to your fingertips without switching between all your browser tabs. By building a graph of your work, you could maximize signal-to-noise. I'm passionate about the developer productivity space, ultimately it was too large of a product to build as the investment landscape changed, and we were unable to close a round.

During my time with Recursive Rebels, my responsibilities and accomplishments include:

• Strings was a product I built ground up. I chose Golang for its simplicity and performance relative to Scala, which I chose for Tally. As a bootstrapped project, I built without a team a microservices platform fully managed using Terraform on Google Cloud, using GKE.
• For strings, built and maintained services for identity management, projects, resource services to parse and replace copy in json, xml, and plist files. Also, services for notifications, version control to push and read changes in source code, and teams for team and profile management. It turned into a large project and became clear I would need a team to take it to the next level.
• Summon was a product I built ground up help of a small team to start. I chose to keep using Golang as it was very successful for Strings and was easier to hire for.
• Built a library to improve our workflow in using DGraph DQL access
• Built a library for event streams, a pattern for asynchronous data processing.
• Creating a recruiting process that shared ownership with the team and grew a fully remote, international team across North and South America,
• Creating and evangelizing a product and technical vision for the team,
• Fostering autonomous teams by letting them self select for their strengths and encourage growth to fill the gaps.
• A continuous deployment pipeline that reduced the time from commit to production to under 15 minutes for all services.
• Creating a process to respond to infrastructure and product incidents by actively promoting 12-factor app as our definition of Done resulting in only one production outage and a mean time to resolution of 30 minutes and mean time to acknowledge of 5 minutes.
• Using Terraform to manage all infrastructure using GitOps and supporting a secured cloud environment for engineers and allowing team to add additional infrastructure and services automatically deployed to Kubernetes.
• Creating a security policy and managing access to services while still having ability to support their own services.
• Creating an Agent pattern for new services to be created that can read and write from APIs from new vendors, such as Slack, Confluence, Google Docs, etc. This resulted in a dramatic productivity boost for the team when creating new agent.
• Building and maintaining a data platform to power visualizations, and track DORA based metrics as a future platform feature
• Creating visualizations and additional views in our front-end platform.

In the second phase of my time at Tally, having hired a more experienced engineering manager, I transitioned to a Staff Engineer focusing on internal tooling and developer platforms. I was given the opportunity to continue management, but chose to focus on engineering as I could have a greater impact. My final accomplishments include:

• Introduce an Incident Support process, including a categorization strategy to prioritize incidents such as security, defects and outages, also to roll out PagerDuty and an on-call schedule across all engineering. The process included automation allowing teams to measure and apply their SLIs and SLOs.
• Built a small web application to allow potential customers to test if they qualify and download the Tally app on their mobile device. It was an upstream sales funnel pilot project that increased customer acquisition by a small percentage
• Built an internal tool for the customer support, credit teams and others to manage the platform and our customers
• When our User Management system was no longer appropriate, I transitioned us to AWS Cognito to improve the security of managing user identity
• Transitioned code versioning from BitBucket to self-hosted GitLab for all teams, and migrated build processes from Jenkins to GitLab's CI/CD to provide fine-grained deployment capabilities and visibility to versions of services in Kubernetes.

This was a personal transition for me as I needed to step back from the leadership side. I wanted to spend more time on the engineering side and I recognize that I have more to learn in managing people and what a rapidly growing company needs for the teams.

Tally helps you save money by automatically paying down your credit card with a revolving line of credit. I was the first hire at Tally and was Head of Engineering. I was responsible for building our MVP which was effectively a bank. I built the stack in Scala with integrations for credit reporting data, credit card information, services for ledgers and payment generation and user management. I was also responsible for establishing a recruiting pipeline and hiring a brilliant team that was ultimately successful on delivering our core products.

In this time, I accomplished the following:

• Created a recruiting process which resulted in the hiring of over 30 engineers. The process was seen as highly engaging and entertaining by candidates and by the team. The process evolved as we collected additional data points but scaled to hiring an international team.
• Built a stack focused on stability and quality for Financial Services. The Scala stack supported growth to 1000s of users and significant annual revenue.
• I oversaw the development of the initial iOS app, and the subsequent Android app
• I hired our Head of Data Engineering and Head of Product Engineering and established a Q/A team and a cloud services (infrastructure) team.

I feel I grew a lot during this time. It was extremely stressful yet incredibly rewarding seeing how successful the company is now. The experience gave me new skills that I applied when building Summon, from which the co-founder from Tally and I ultimately teamed up to build Summon.

Poshly was a beauty meet data start-up. We believed that personal data should power all beauty and personal care decision-making. Be it a brand, publisher or industry person trying to better understand a consumer and how to reach them or the end consumer who wants to find the right product for them - based on people with similar characteristics.

I was responsible for building the platform and tools for the initial MVP. One of the tools I built was a white-labeled solution hosted by People Magazine which resulted in us handling traffic for 40K simultaneous users. Without crashing from the load.

International Fund Services (IFS) is a subsidiary of State Street, providing back-office support, fund accounting, administration and other services for hedge funds, private equity and other fund types.

This time was a bridge to building Poshly as we bootstrapped that company.

SecondMarket was a financial services startup that aims to bring liquidity to illiquid assets such as Common Shares and Stock Options for Private Companies

I was brought in as a Sr Java Engineer who initially worked with an existing Java application build on GWT, Spring 2.0 and Postgres but pushed through an effort to improve the platform for performance, scalability and to improve the user experience

I built a proof-of-concept application that leveraged modern technologies that demonstrated a decoupled application architecture that dramatically improved developer turnaround time, reduced application complexity and a modern user interface The result was renewed respect for the technology group and allowed us to build a new platform product group and a new exciting way to build the business

I was then responsible for building a platform team where we built eight applications to provide services to the web team. I developed an architecture that built on our best developers strengths while leveraging the modern (at the time) web-centric tools such as SOLR for search, MongoDB for documented oriented structured data.

In the span of six months, my team built the back-end service infrastructure that supported a 50,000 user base at its peak.

SecondMarket represented a change in my career development as it was my first foray into the Financial industry and was my first position with a non-consulting company. I had found the experience deeply rewarding and gave me the passion to build a new company.

I have had a rich and diverse career with Online Business Systems, working my way from a junior Java developer to the Chief Solution Architect for the Pacific-Northwest Region. I have always demonstrated a natural affinity to solving complex business problems with elegant design and lead development teams to deliver the solutions to the client while balancing client requirements and project budgets

• Salt Lake County: Urban Area Security Initiative I improved their interoperability between their dispatch call centers or E9-1-1 centers. I was responsible for building a solution for near real-time resource tracking during times of emergency, using messaging to ensure a scalable and fault-tolerant messaging platform
• Ohio Chiefs of Police: Integrating Justice Information Systems I provided technical expertise assistance to a variety of issues facing OLLEISN in moving to a new information exchange model, known as NIEM
• City of Seattle Police Department: SPIDER The Seattle Police Department had over twenty major systems that needed to be able to access and exchange information in a secure and reliable manner. I was responsible for bringing technical direction and best practices to the project. The solution architecture supported a massive exchange of information between systems in a unified enterprise.
• City of Seattle SeaJIS: eBooking To better serve and demonstrate the value of the SeaJIS (Seattle Justice Information System), I was responsible for migrating the existing infrastructure to a fault-tolerant and continuously availability platform. On this platform we enabled of the exchange of booking information from King County, the largest county in the state. I was responsible for designing and implementing the web service requirements, including web service message based encryption, audits management and reliability features
• City of Portland: 911 Dispatch I assisted a 911 Call Center in enabling their CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) System with an endpoint implementation and design. I improved the service of a Call Center by binding their Emergency Dispatch System to a Service Bus we developed for the Portland Dispatch Call-Center Consortium

For EDS Systemhouse Inc., Network Integration Services, my duties covered a broad range of areas including:

• Application development with Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Windows Scripting Host.
• Designing and implementing new Windows NT-based networks with both small companies and a large enterprise network.
• Project management for three different teams simultaneously, on an application migration for the Government of Manitoba.

I was a graduate of the University of Manitoba, Computer Science department. I had elected to take the Cooperative Program which had an extra year, where I could have industry experience.