The Humble Fungus was a “spore to table” organic mushroom farm and mycology laboratory I founded in 2019. I created the company, applying my decades of engineering, problem solving and scientific focus to modern mushroom cultivation, fungal genetics work and conservation. We grew fresh, organic mushrooms selling them at farmers markets, developed online tutorials and guides, managed and operated a laboratory with over 300 unique species or varieties at its peak. Prior to closing I had grown the business to $165,000 in net sales in under 3 years through community building, teaching and product engineering.

On the Azure Kubernetes Service (part of Azure Cloud) I worked closely with our largest customers and open source community diagnosing systemic product issues including performance, reliability and supportability. Leveraging my decades of Linux, storage, hypervisor reliability and other experience.Focused on product reliability, service levels, performance, scalability and back-end service systems design.Frequent/Deep debugging of systemic issues impacting customers on the AKS service including core Linux and Kubernetes issues.Diagnosed and solves many long standing and wide-spread systems design / implementation issues impacting Linux on Azure.Turned findings and customer feedback and needs into product features, tools, tests and documentation. Led cross-discipline functional teams to change engineering and product approaches at the organization level.

Lead multiple global teams of software engineers, architects and others developing new products to open new lines of revenue for the company including the Carina CaaS (Docker Swarm), Managed Kubernetes service, developer experience and enterprise storage teams.Led the requirements gathering, planning, product delivery schedules, development, budgeting, and resource allocation for multiple products for our Public and Private Cloud portfolios.Put in place KPIs & OKRs to track engineering organization improvement metrics focused on repeatable and consistent product delivery and engineering improvements.Engaged with enterprise customers on our offerings and portfolios, briefing them on our solutions and providing analysis of competitors and requirements for those customers.Working with executive leadership to analyse and plan new product offerings, partnering with Product management through market research, user testing and feature planning.Fostered culture of innovation by leading product and technology brainstorming sessions.Lead the Information Development organization, leading them through a complete re-definition of Information Development across the business including modern git/code based workflows (docs as code), defined information lifecycles and re-built the internal job families to offer employees greater career growth and agility. Lead the Developer Experience teams for the Rackspace Cloud product portfolio including associated financial programs, feature development. Put in place KPIs for developer adoption and conversion for the teams. Managed the financial budgets for event speaking, sponsorship and set the strategy for which events were attended, reviewed talks and presented metrics to executive leadership.

Advised executive leadership and product leadership on developer experience & outreach programs, new emergent technologies to adopt & productize. Mentored engineering teams across the business.The Rackspace "Technology Career Track" (Principle to Distinguished engineers) is reserved for top engineering talent with a focus on cross-business and discipline large scale problem solving.Worked with Finance and executive leadership to spearhead new programs for developers and managed those programs from a full P&L standpoint. This includes the developer discount program, open source hosting program, etc. Provided key metrics and reports to the directors and above group.Spoke and attended at key strategic technology events to hone Rackspace's developer experience group initiative, garnering critical products and pricing to increase market adoption.Architected and developed developer enabling tools across multiple programming languages and set KPIs in place to measure adoption & conversion rates.Analyze and brief executive leadership on technical due-diligence efforts, new technologies and trends for M&A or productization.Mentored and performed code reviews for teams across the business.Collected user / developer feedback and worked across the business to get new features, fixes or other areas of concern fixed.Developed and lead the internal effort to focus specifically on developer adoption of Rackspace services frequently providing financial models to support the need to service that community more robustly.

Served as a Director for the foundation focused on sponsorship revenue, community growth & expansion. Diversity activities and grants programs for the Python community.

Oversaw and lead the largest annual Python Programming conference in the world, including marketing efforts, outreach, on site coordination, and overall management.Spearheaded the explosive growth of both conference attendance and the exponential growth of sponsorship turning the conference into a primary revenue stream for the PSF.Managed and oversaw outreach efforts, coordination with sponsors, keynote speakers, and other activities for the conference.Acted as the public face for the conference, reporting to the Python Software Foundation board of directors on management of a budget greater than $1M, blogging and marketing, and other publicly facing roles.

Assisted the rest of the core Python development team in bug triage and fixes, feature additions, python enhancement proposals, etc for the Python programming language. Led the inclusion of the multiprocessing and other modules within the community.

Early-stage employee for the enterprise storage startup, helping lead architecture and design, implement key systems and user interfaces. Responsible for design and implementation of various components and services within the Nasuni Filer product, including core libraries and tools.Lead the implementation of the Filer management and user interface using Python, Django, JavaScript, and other technologies.Act as the UI/UX design lead for the Filer management and user interface, focusing on simplicity of administration and overall user experience.Assist in the evolution and design of the product from original consumer/SMB-focused implementation to the current Enterprise product.Prolific blogger & technical writer for the company.

Technical lead and Architect for the Test Engineering group, developing common libraries, tools, and frameworks for large scale and continuous automated testing.Architected and implemented the testing harness for a massively distributed video encoding/edge-cache device including complete hardware to product bootstrapping, testing for network partition / CAP guarantees of the system.Lead the development of a common Python-based SDK for integration with the Blackwave productDeveloped, identified and published components of the Test Engineering infrastructureto the open source communityDrove individual, complex Blackwave product features through the complete design, implementation, testing, and release cycle.

Early stage employee Archivas, Inc. assisting in the growth to a 100+ member company and eventual acquisition by Hitachi Data Systems.Developed and maintained the Hitachi Content Archiving Platform installation and upgrade system. The application is a distributed installation harness built in Python.Developed and maintained the primary distributed and de-centralized automatedtesting framework (named “Grinder”) responsible for all non-unit test based regression tests for HCAP. The testing framework was responsible for the execution of close to 6000 individual and complex tests.Acted as a Python teacher and mentor to the Automation and QA/Dev team, helping to maintain and improve well over 100,000 lines of Python library, test, and product code.Performed engineering-level customer support and triage including patch creation, issue identification, and internal coordination and communication.Developed and maintained a variety of debugging and interaction tools for the HCAP product.Acquired/Applied for Patents 8230267 and US20070162894

Senior Software and QA Engineer for the Archivas distributed storage platform, primary focus in Python programming and quality assurance. Designed and implemented multiple automated testing frameworks, installation/configuration management deployment systems for the storage platform.

Worked for Allaire/Macromedia on the ColdFusion application server team, specializing in Linux support and architecture/QA as well as performance testing and product QA. Also dealt with product security and auditing and customer-facing communication.