About
About Me
I'm a software/systems engineer with a passion for problem solving. I am opinionated, but try my best to be open-minded. Those who have worked with me know I won't shy away from telling you how I feel - I think directness is critical to effective communication.
My career has spanned across the aerospace and defence industry, finance, and commercial software. I've worked mostly as software architect, which has given me broad exposure to all of the things that make software engineering teams successful. I value rigorous engineering practices, DevOps, and agile. Over the past few years, I have developed interests in team dynamics and understanding why some teams are more effective than others.
I now hold several roles where I get to leverage my breadth of experience. The roles I've enjoyed most leverage a balance of my systems and software engineering skills to architect systems that solve real-world business problems.
I earned my B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Central Florida in 2014 and my M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 2018.
About this site
This site is a place for me to write things down - mostly to capture my own thoughts. If it turns out to be useful for anyone else, all the better.
Technical Background
Languages
I began programming in MATLAB and Python in 2009. Python is my preferred programming language when I want to optimize before developer time. I am also fluent in JavaScript/Typescript, Java, and Bash. I have historical experience with other languages including C/C++, MATLAB, Julia, and PHP. More recently, I've been working more with Kotlin and Rust.
Frameworks & Tools
I've been using React for nearly all front-end development in recent years (including this site). For API's I've used Express, Flask, and Spring Boot. Express.js on AWS Lambda has become a preferred approach for me on a number of projects that allows for mid-level performance while enabling scalability and minimizing maintance costs and risk. MongoDB is my most used database. I've used Elasticsearch as an analytics data store for a number of data engineering projects and system monitoring.
Cloud
I spent the first few years of my career gaining a depth of experience in low-level and embedded computing, virtual machine labs, and cyber testing. Since then, I have spent the majority of my time designing and implementing cloud-based applications. Most of my cloud development work has used Amazon Web Services and custom on-premises solutions. I have also used Docker significantly. I've begun exploring Azure for limited use cases on recent projects. Azure Static Web Apps has proven to be particularly useful.
DevOps
As strong proponent of modern DevOps practices, I encourage teams to make heavy and early investments in automation. My CI/CD pipeline development background runs the gamut of Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions is currently my preferred platform. For provisioning and configuration I prefer Terraform. I've used Ansible a bit, but for many scenarios (commonly serverless and containers), I tend to write my own scripts for simplicity and control.
Agile
Coinciding with my DevOps and engineering experience is an extensive Agile background. I prefer Scrum as an execution framework and have experience coaching teams as they adopt Scrum for the first time as well as helping large organizations scale agile practices.
My most used approach for scaling agile has been SAFe®. Despite criticisms that SAFe® is too prescriptive, I've found it to be a useful because it can act as a superset to Scrum allowing success at the team level to be an enabler for success at scale.
Additional Info
Disclosures
I decided to include a disclosures section here to make clear my biases and external interests.
I am the majority owner and Managing Director of Triple Dot Engineering, which I reference in several places on this site. Triple Dot Engineering does not make any money from this site.
I also hold an Adjunct Instructor position at the University of Central Florida and use this site to post writings of particular relevance to my students. All UCF targeted posts are tagged with "UCF".
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