On select projects, I dive deeply into high performance and secure software development. I surface to evangelize on relevant system performance and API security trends.A lot needs to go right to build a distributed application or microservice. Teams stay productive by separating concerns into a full system stack. Compromises decoupling the layers come at the cost of end to end performance and brittle security. When the cost gets too high, teams fail.At CriticalBlue, I work with outside product teams in one of three ways:- Consulting with teams to develop productive high performance and secure methodologies, ensuring teams hit their marks first time through.- Sometimes, a team is only capable of focusing on functionality, trading performance or security for time to market. We step in to iteratively close the gaps.- We offer turnkey solutions for certain high value performance and security problems, for example, the Approov solution for mobile API security.With a performance or security problem, we first characterize and segment data flows, separately optimize each flow, and integrate the overall solution. Fast path, slow-path routing is a well-known example.I bring a deep perspective from chip design, reconfigurable FPGA computing, formal verification, embedded development, cryptography acceleration, and mobile and distributed internet systems. Constrained optimization and best practice teaching are my recurring themes. Today I practice as a Linux, Android, and Node performance and API security expert.What gets me up every morning? Tackling a tricky software performance or security problem by going a few abstraction levels deeper than the mainstream developer, making the solution intuitive, telling the story, and watching people get it.To stay in touch, click on the blue Connect button above. For performance solutions, check out prism-services.io. For mobile API security, check out approov.io. Both are also reachable from criticalblue.com.