About

I have over a decade of experience across a wide variety of software & data platform projects, from startups to large enterprises.

I've spent the last 2 years building out the Data Platform mostly from scratch @ ngrok, where I've also spent considerable time working on product features, working on a distributed go codebase and dealing with many fun networking and distributed computing problems. Before that, I worked at Shopify, solving fun stream processing problems with Scala. Even before that, I've spent a lot of time in consulting, where I've seen a lot of different systems, companies and solved equally as many problems.

These days, I probably split my time about equally between product development, data engineering, and infrastructure & operations. Because of that, I don't like the word "Data Engineer" - I'm not your guy if you need SQL modelling!

I also write about programming, home lab, Linux, servers, GIS, and other things I find fun on my blog. I've been doing that since 2016, so you have a few articles to catch up on!

If you need something specific to read, I recommend Building a functional, effectful Distributed System from scratch in Scala 3, just to avoid Leetcode (Part 1) and Part 2 (Consistency Guarantees & Background Tasks).

If you care more about home lab and Linux content, you'll likely enjoy My 2025 Homelab Updates: Quadrupling Capacity (or any of the other Linux tagged articles).

I usually write about stuff I simply find interesting, so that I have an excuse to spend more time with it (and I believe you only really understand something you can explain to others). Rarely do I claim to be an expert in those topics. If you find something that you deem is incorrect, you’re more than welcome to reach out and I’d happily correct it.

I largely code in Scala, go, and Python. I'm also reasonably familiar with Java, TypeScript, Bash, various SQL dialects.

These last few years, almost all my deployments have been on Kubernetes, with a focus on maintainable IaC. I've worked with most of the relevant data frameworks and tools, recently namely Flink, Spark, Dagster, dbt, and lots of Kafka.

While I don't like SQL much, I like building systems for people who do. Iceberg + Trino has been a great choice, but I'm also partial to Clickhouse and BigQuery and no stranger to PostgreSQL or MySQL.

I've worked with all major Cloud providers - AWS, GCP, and Azure - as well as with bare-metal and in-house infrastructure. I run my own Proxmox cluster.

I'm based out of Canton, GA, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. If I'm not working, you'll likely find me roaming the woods of North Georgia or digging through our vegetable garden.

Because of that, I have no interest in anything involving a corporate office and am 100% remote in everything I do.