I expanded and professionalized RedZone's engineering organization, intentionally building for the long-term in terms of both system resiliency and developer experience. Taking the long view means focusing not only on building (and testing, and documenting, and deploying) quality software, but ensuring its operational stability. To serve that end I spearheaded technological solutions (integrated telemetry, infrastructure-as-code, progressive alerting) in support of proven devops principles and practices (blameless post-mortems, root cause analyses, explicit service ownership).

I was service owner and primary engineer for the Python-based REST APIs powering both NYPL's eReading platform, SimplyE, as well as the Open Ebooks project which provides eBooks to children in Title I schools.

Worked on multiple client-facing webapps written in Python/Django. I'll be honest, this wasn't a great time. We had pulled our kid out of school due to COVID about the same time I started, and being isolated together as a family in a small house, while novel, was not entirely conducive to software engineering success. Just a real bummer of a year, 2020; one star, would not live through again.

Short-term consulting engagement with a vendor of solar technology, helping their in-house team achieve a launch-ready MVP for their primary user-facing product.

To support CORI's ability to analyze and serve geographic data on a reasonable budget, I containerized, provisioned, and administered the open source version of the CARTO software stack as a collection of networked ECS instances in AWS. Doing so required working with code in Ruby, JavaScript, and Unix shell scripts, as well as supporting PostgreSQL / PostGIS and Redis instances.

Consulting engagement with a nascent presidential campaign interested in creating a suite of supporter engagement tools, both for internal use and as a spin-off commercial venture. Having built similar toolsets several times previously, I assisted their Technical Project Manager in designing a comprehensive product outlay, and worked to implement a set of compatible backend systems as containerized Python applications running in Amazon Web Services.

Ran a woodshop, made furniture, cabinets, what have you. It was great fun and an exciting set of challenges, but sadly Seattle's cost of living isn't particularly hospitable to non-software levels of income.

Built web-scale infrastructure and services for the Groundwork platform, which powered the 2016 HFA presidential campaign. I helped bootstrap the company's product development process, and was the owner of a high-availability supporter signup service in Python/Django, with PostgreSQL storage layer, deployed on custom AMIs in AWS EC2, with application telemetry via CloudWatch and DataDog.

Following the 2012 election the MoveOn.org PAC was dissolved, and I found myself at loose ends. Being in Seattle (and somewhat tired of politics), I took two separate corporate engagements through Rooster Park. First, working on the frontend of Nordstrom's ecommerce presence, I produced visual assets and code in partnership with UI/UX, product, QA, and various server-side teams. Then as part of a four person, year-long "internal startup" group at AT&T, I built an e-commerce recommendation engine powered by Hadoop and Riak data pipelines, which became the first machine-learning feature of the AT&T ecommerce website.

For the 2012 election cycle I decided to work directly for MoveOn's Political Action Committee as Technical Campaign Manager. I partnered with campaigners in creating novel tactics for engaging our network of millions of activists, in service of both get-out-the-vote efforts and shorter-term campaigns that emerged over the course of that year. I also advised mid-level and executive leadership on technical priorities within the organization, and how to balance new, emergent projects against technical debt, documentation, and staff education.

I was asked to join We Also Walk Dogs in preparation for the 2008 national election cycle. The company was small (six to eight engineers, no other staff), but provided significant custom development for multiple large-scale progressive political organizations, each with several million active members. Some of our clients brought us in on specific projects, while for others (particularly MoveOn.org) we were embedded as part of the team. The work had both technical and strategic dimensions, as we were equal partners with the political operatives in trying to create maximal impact for each new initiative.After the 2008 cycle wrapped up we decided to try our hand at creating a platform-as-a-service based on our combined years of experience serving campaign interests. This led to the creation of ActionKit, a highly successful suite of constituent-relationship-management and activation tools which eventually was acquired by NGP VAN / EveryAction as part of an effort to consolidate tech on the progressive left.

In my first software industry job (having previously been a charter school teacher) I had a number of evolving responsibilities. While I was initially working with Java code for a large-scale Tomcat webapp, my teaching background meant that I was tapped to train our users and developers at our client organizations, both remotely and on-site. I also came to oversee our tier 1 technical support employees and occasional interns, and served as a high-touch support contact for our largest customers. Eventually I was promoted to Database Administrator, where I partnered with our senior system administrator to oversee the multi-master MySQL installation which served our production environments.