01 / Safety Ally
Quiet until it matters.
Set a safety check-in time, tap once to say you are safe, and alert someone you trust only when a check-in is missed.
Visit Safety Ally
Backend engineer · Technical lead · AI-assisted product builder · Portland, Oregon
Backend systems, built for the moment they’re needed most.
Ruby, Go, cloud infrastructure, production support, and AI-assisted software development that turns ideas into reliable production systems.
01 / Selected systems
Useful software, operated with care.
Products specified, built, verified, and kept running.
02 / Lantern
See the shape of a network.
A local-first workspace for exploring devices, services, names, ownership, and routes.
View Lantern on GitHub
03 / RepoPlay
Drop a history export. Watch the tree grow.
Replay Git history as an animated tree, galaxy, map, city, skyline, constellation, terrain, radial tree, or mycelium. Nothing leaves the browser.
Visit RepoPlay
04 / DirFlow
Drop a directory listing. Watch storage take shape.
Turn file dates, sizes, and directory structure into an animated tree, field of spheres, or map. Nothing leaves the browser.
Visit DirFlow
02 / Career trace
Development informed by production.
A path from incident ownership to backend and platform leadership.
Oct 2024 - Present
Independent Product / Platform Engineer
Independent Development · Remote
Dec 2022 - Sep 2024
Lead Backend Developer / Technical Team Lead
GoX Labs · Remote
Aug 2019 - Nov 2022
Career Pause
Personal Leave · Portland, Oregon
Jan 2017 - Aug 2019
Custom Solutions Manager
Comcast Technology Solutions · Remote
Sep 2015 - Jan 2017
Technical Support Lead
Comcast Technology Solutions · Remote
Jun 2014 - Sep 2015
Senior Support Engineer
thePlatform for Media · Seattle, Washington
May 2013 - Jun 2014
Application Support IV
thePlatform for Media · Seattle, Washington
May 2011 - May 2013
Application Support Engineer
thePlatform for Media · Seattle, Washington
03 / Selected evidence
What the headline metrics leave out.
Four systems stories, drawn directly from shipped work and production operations.
Used coding agents to compress the path from idea to production.
- Built repeatable AI-assisted workflows around repo-local work plans that preserve goals, constraints, verified state, and next steps across long-running sessions, using them to ship and operate Safety Ally, Lantern, RepoPlay, and DirFlow.
- Built a durable check-in engine with timezone-aware recurrence, transactional notification queues, database leases, retries, staged escalation, acknowledgement, and resolution workflows.
- Deployed and operate the ARM64 AWS production stack with health-gated releases, validated deployment automation, rollback procedures, and end-to-end logging, metrics, tracing, and dashboards.
Modernized a Rails platform without taking it offline.
- Migrated legacy services to AWS ECS and reduced infrastructure costs during a lean operating period.
- Upgraded Rails 5 to Rails 7 with zero downtime.
- Improved SQL query performance by 25 percent through query and ORM optimization.
Turned a six-hour deployment into a one-minute open-source system.
- Built and open-sourced the MPX SDK (cts-mpx) and CI tooling in Ruby.
- Built and open-sourced MPX ACI (cts-mpx-aci), a graph-aware transformation engine for migrating media configurations and dependencies between development and production environments.
- Earned the Comcast Starr Award for ACI-driven deployment automation that cut cycle time from 6h to 1m, saving ~$300K/year.
- Built 654 RSpec examples across cts-mpx and cts-mpx-aci, reaching 98.65% and 96.79% coverage.
Operated and debugged production from the host fleet outward.
- Built Splunk dashboards tracking latency, error rates, and throughput and configured alerts to surface problems before customers reported them.
- Served as the final technical escalation before management for complex production issues, coordinating directly with managers and senior operational leaders during outages.
- Performed NOC duties for the deployment, health, and maintenance of roughly 2,700 production hosts across two data centers of approximately 1,500 and 1,200 hosts.
- Diagnosed production issues by scraping and correlating logs directly on hosts before centralized Splunk logging was available.
04 / Capabilities
Direct. Build. Ship. Observe. Own.
Coding agents accelerate the loop. Testing, verification, and ownership make it production-ready.
01
AI
AI-assisted development with production-grade verification
- Generative AI / coding agents
- Prompt / context engineering
- Task decomposition / agent orchestration
- Repo-local work plans / durable agent context
- AI-assisted testing / debugging / code review
- MCP servers / tool integration
02
Build
Services, APIs, and tooling
- Ruby
- Go
- Python
- JavaScript / TypeScript
- React / Vite
- Ruby on Rails
03
Ship
Cloud and delivery
- AWS ECS / EC2 / ECR / RDS / S3 / Lambda
- CloudWatch / IAM
- Docker
- GitHub Actions / CircleCI / Travis CI
- TeamCity / Jenkins
- Capistrano / Rundeck
04
Observe
Signals and diagnosis
- Splunk
- Grafana
- CloudWatch
- APM / distributed request tracing
- Prometheus / OpenTelemetry / Tempo
- Dashboards / alerting
05
Operate
Production systems
- Linux administration
- Bash / shell scripting
- TCP/IP / DNS / HTTP(S) / VPN / SSL
- Incident response / on-call
- Root-cause analysis
- High-availability architecture / disaster recovery
05 / Route by role
One career record. Four useful views.
Each version is available as a web page and a downloadable PDF.
R-00
Complete
Full career history, AI-assisted delivery, projects, technical depth, education, and recognition.
R-01
Backend
APIs, Rails, Go, AI-assisted development, data, testing, and technical leadership.
R-02
DevOps
Cloud, AI-assisted automation, observability, delivery, Linux, and reliability.
R-03
Application Support
Incidents, AI-assisted diagnostics, escalation, customer systems, and reliability.