The Command Line Podcast is a program I produce independently discussing professional engineering, public policy and technology, and in-depth technical news. I also host the program and interview guests from the software industry, independent creators, and leaders in free software and open source.

Lead a small team of onshore and offshore developers building point solutions and an operations platform to help consumers buy, sell, and maintain their cars without the hassles of traditional auto sales. Drove the adoption of Typescript, teaching the rest of the team directly and through example. Wrote two backend frameworks to supplement Lambda and Nextjs to reduce boilerplate and toil for common cross cutting concerns such as authentication, authorization, database connection pool access, and logging. Wrote a data pipeline from scratch in Rust to ingest multiple data sources to produce data needed for new features like dealer reviews and an administrative portal for our supplier partners to manage inventory and discounts on vehicles offered through the CarEdge marketplace. Responsible for platform architecture, SRE/DevOps, and mentoring the rest of the team.

Worked on Site Reliability and Innovation. Built tools and processes for dev ops and in support of machine learning. Joined to help some colleagues I had worked with previously get the organization through a critical technology migration project. Wrote a data and file copying tool, using Rust with AWS Data Pipeline, to support the migration and the company's efforts to improve quality control and assurance. The tool resets development and other lower environments with fresh, known good data to reduce or eliminate unreliable automated and manual testing.

Supported and managed seventeen direct reports, including performance management, compensation planning, regular feedback, and career coaching. Collaborated with a team of two full time and four part time managers to support a tribe of forty software developers. Collaborated on quarterly roadmaps and objectives including writing regular reviews for upper management. Managed the relationship with key SaaS providers (AWS, CloudFlare, et. al.) including contract negotiations and renewals, invoicing, and sharing their technical training and resources with the members of the tribe.

Supported and managed twelve direct reports, including performance management, compensation planning, regular feedback, and career coaching. Collaborated with a team of five full time managers to support a tribe of sixty software developers. Helped design and launch an organizing framework between squads and the tribe in order to support better focus on long term objectives and allow squads the flexibility to form and re-form as needed to pursue them. Helped designed and launched an organizing framework for cross cutting concerns, like quality and security, to provide more focus and resources to all squads to help ensure consistency and reduce duplicated effort. Taught a six month course on the Rust programming language to help devops squad improve their fluency.

Vistaprint Digital is the group within Vistaprint responsible for developing, delivering and supporting the digital products to help small business owners succeed.Work on tools and infrastructure for dev ops. Agile facilitator for dev ops team. Coach three other engineers on their career development. Until mid-2017 worked as a full-stack developer on Vistaprint Digital’s next generation web site builder. Was lead of a team of five product engineers and two engineers in test. Was agile facilitator for the team for a year before becoming its lead at the start of 2017. Facilitate the mentorship guild which supports career coaches and mentors throughout the organization.• Writing a configuration and deployment tool inspired by tools like npm and cargo. Built infrastructure services running in a Kubernetes cluster to support development and testing. Services include a test environment orchestration and management tool and a developer single sign-on service that is API compatible with the production SSO service.• One of the top contributors to Vistaprint Digital's new website builder, an ambitious single-page app built with React and its supporting microservice built with node. Coded extensively on both the front and back end of the product. Notably migrated the server code from a hand rolled MVC framework to Sails.js. Wrote the dynamic template engine that makes it possible during the first time experience to see website templates customized to customers interests, industry and goals.• During an aggressive, marketing driven deadline to bring the new website builder to market, worked on a domain name product, a microservice built with the Spring Boot framework with a React front end. Transitioned to lead the team during the final push of this effort. The team consistently hit its milestones throughout this headlong rush to market.

The Open Technology Institute is a high profile program in the world of technology public policy that utilizes a unique multi-disciplinary approach to improve equitable access to communications technology.Responsible for simultaneously managing several technology projects focusing on open source wireless networking and big data. Supervised a team of twelve technologists. Raised necessary funds from charitable foundations, corporate donors, and federal agencies. Approved and managed annual individual project budgets including staffing, contracting, travel and other expenditures.• Transformed the technology staff into an effective team as its very first director by creating a clear organizational structure, providing a plan for career advancement, and working with staff through regular, structured one-on-one meetings to enhance their core strengths and address challenges and opportunities concretely.• Successfully completed a $2.8M federal grant for the development of version 1.0 of Commotion Wireless, a multi-platform open source communications toolkit, by implementing and improving project management best practices, working hands on through each critical milestone, and growing the team from one to ten technologists.• Increased funding for Measurement Lab from $250K a year to more than $800K for 2014 by directly improving the operational maturity of the core technology, expanding the team from one technologist to five, and implementing a strategic vision that expanded the project to start measuring online censorship.• Helped the organization safely transition leadership from startup to mature, sustainable organization through working closely with the rest of the management team to understand and mitigate risks, communicate with staff, and support new leadership.• Strengthened the programming skills of the technology staff by leading group study sessions and brown bags, sharing years of practical programming experience, securing resources, and reviewing code.

Worked on “Our Nation’s Attic,” an exploration and demonstration of the importance of works of the government in promoting creativity and economic activity through the creation and documentation of an American Pale Ale, an open source beer.

Learning Objects is an established social learning software-as-a-service product that integrates with the leading learning management systems (LMS) used by higher education institutions. Learning Objects provides flexible content and collaboration tools, specifically wikis, blogs and podcasts and adds advanced customization and a rich permissions model for sharing.Full stack developer who worked with ExtJS, jQuery, HTML/JavaScript/CSS, Enterprise Java, Glassfish, PostgreSQL, Lucene and Cassandra. Improved and maintained all aspects of the low level database code from its performance to the usability of its APIs. Overhauled and maintained the indexing engine to ensure high quality results in processing user content and acceptable performance when searching that content. Scrum master for the engineering team.• Increased the speed of delivery new product features from an average 6 weeks down to 2 by evaluating current agile project methodologies, selecting and training on Scrum, and leading the engineering team in adopting and using it for over a year.• Improved responsiveness of the product by a factor of three by reviewing database logs and execution plans from PostgreSQL, optimizing SQL queries, and re-factoring low level database access code.• Made ongoing performance monitoring and improvement possible by writing a log analysis and reporting application in Python and Django so that dev ops, other senior engineers, and product management could understand where performance concerns were emerging in close to real time to plan for necessary fixes and improvements as needed.• Prepared the product for future scaling needs by evaluating alternative data storage options, selecting the Cassandra NoSQL data store, and writing the necessary new code in such a way that no one else's code on the team had to change to take advantage of the new back end.

Brivo Systems disrupted the space of access control by introducing a web interface to control access to facilities so customers could manage and monitor their physical security from anywhere. Brivo combined their web application with their own, easy to install and maintain, custom hardware based on a system-on-chip design running embedded Linux.Full stack developer who worked with HTML/CSS/Javascript, Enterprise Java, Struts, Jboss, Oracle, and C. Led the team responsible for the server components of the product. Maintained the existing versions of the server applications while designing newer versions. Worked on the low level code with a focus on the database and back end, to support the server engineering team.• Successfully managed a complete staff turnover in the first few months on the job by learning the existing code and single handedly maintaining it in production while hiring an all new team.• Reduced problems in production from a frequency of once a week to less than once a quarter by reviewing logs with production support staff, statically analyzing code, and quickly turning around necessary fixes, including full quality assurance review and testing.Improved updates to production code from an average of 12 hours, with only a 60% success rate, to on average of 1 hour with a 100% success rate by continually improving the quality of the code, adopting much more rigorous build processes and configuration management, and scripting every step of the necessary upgrades including the ability to roll back at any point during the process.• Increased the performance and capacity of the control and configuration server that supported the hardware products by a factor of four by thoroughly re-writing that code, continuously testing through that whole process both to ensure no regressions and to assess concretely the actual improvements yielded by each change to the code.

Qbit was a small research and development startup that was seeking to revolutionize data compression by mining innovative ideas from the physical sciences and proving them out through a close collaboration between software engineers and research scientists.First engineering hire, promoted to VP halfway through employment. Grew the engineering group to eight engineers on three teams. Responsible for business development, explaining the benefits and details of particular research and development offerings to prospective licensees. Created and maintained product roadmaps. Managed engineering staff to meet milestones from product roadmaps through successful translation of the ideas and models produced by a staff of research scientists.• Helped secure early stage funding by working hands on to produce and demonstrate first viable compression prototype, translating research outputs in MATLAB and Mathematica into Java and C code.• Secured first licensees with potential for revenue by showing off the latest research developments through live technical demonstrations as part of business development both on the road and in the office and answering subsequent in-depth questions about the technology and underlying research.

B2eMarkets transformed the space of online procurement by pioneering the use of reverse auctions, sealed bids and other competitive bidding and response models coupled with a suite of performance monitoring and management tools to drive and maintain greater efficiencies in its customers procurement relationships and practices.Full stack developer who worked with HTML/JavaScript/CSS, Enterprise Java, Struts, Oracle, Linux. Built new modules and features for an established startup. Worked on both the back end code and increasingly on entire vertical sections (front, middle ware and back end) in support of a given product feature. Participated and led several large scale design efforts including a first version of a set of web services for integration and a deeper re-think of the overall system organization to make maintaining core code in parallel with feature development more effective.• Saved several weeks worth of engineering time during a major update to the product by designing and developing a set of features, the interfaces for a respondent to submit their bids and replies to a procurement query, with such a high degree of clarity and reliability that 90% of the code was adapted and re-used throughout the rest of the application.• Delivered a new decision support module by writing a third of the code, mostly the mathematical algorithms, and efficiently working through a near total re-write partway through the project in response to early performance issues revealed by initial QA testing without incurring any delays.• Completed a product module, for supplier performance assessment, by investing more in early design and development, iterating quickly, working directly on the most challenging coding tasks, and supporting a dedicate team of developers. This was the first module to be delivered early and under budget.

marchFirst was originally USWeb, a national software consulting firm focused exclusively on bringing businesses to the web with a focus on e-commerce. The DC practice also had a complementary focus on online collaboration applications.Started as senior engineer then promoted in 1999 to Director. As a senior engineer, worked on all aspects of the software development life cycle: requirements analysis, functional specification, technical design, implementation, and maintenance. As a director, participated in departmental planning and budgeting and liaised with other departments to better integrate their efforts with those of the engineering staff.