Code Plumber

Seattle, WA, USA

signal | whatsapp | email | blog | github

He/Him

Technical Skills

Operating Systems: Linux, macOS

Programing Languages: Python (competent to expert), Ruby, Java, Shell, C (rusty!)

Software Lifecycle: Git, AWS internal tools, Github, CodeDeploy

Cloud Services: AWS1, Docker

Tools: Emacs, Git2, my tools category here

Present Employment

GitHub - Sept 2022 - Present: DAG vendor

Staff Software Engineer, Deployment

  • Led a project to apply multiple security best practices to the deployment systems
  • Designed methods for managing sensitive materials during deployments for the company

Staff Software Engineer, Migrations

  • Technical leadership for a team of 15
  • Led design for observability and tracing in the migrations system

Open Source Software

  • Lead developer of the current Hugo Awards nominations and voting system, NomNom.
  • Maintainer of the Python implementation of the Hamcrest matcher package, PyHamcrest.
  • I have small contributions in a range of OSS developer tool projects including overmind, starship, and pelican.

Past Employment

May 2011 - Aug 2022: All kinds of Cloud Things

Amazon Web Services

Senior Software Engineer. Expertise in build systems, Python, deployment safety.

  • Author and maintainer of build systems, CI/CD services, deployment systems, and software quality enforcement.
  • Primary global point of contact and evangelist for python's use as a development language within Amazon.
  • Designed the interpreter dependency model used by Python, Ruby, NodeJS, and Java developers at Amazon. This allowed a rapid response to newly-discovered vulnerability reports by all of Amazon.
  • Part of the cross-AWS incident call leader rotation. Notable recent incidents include the response to Log4Shell.
  • Curator of Amazon's first party codebase3.
  • 3 issued patents for network configuration management.
  • US 9992064 B1 - Network Device Configuration Deployment Pipeline
  • US 9893940 B1 - Topologically Aware Network Device Configuration
  • US 9419856 B1 - Network Device Configuration Deployment Pipeline

June 2009 - May 2011 - Web Applications and Deployment Automation

Advanis

  • Automated deployment for web applications, marketing surveys, and telephony applications.
  • ActionScript/Flex/PHP web application development4.
  • System automation with Python/Fabric.

2005 - June 2009 - Intern and FTE Banking and Messaging Software

Core360

  • Migration from CVS to SVN5.
  • Maintain and extend a nightly autobuild system.
  • Coded and maintained J2EE and legacy C services for B2B messaging systems.

Personal Achievements and Hobbies

Volunteer open source contributor

IT area head for Chicon 8 (the 2022 World Science Fiction convention)

Completed the Seattle to Portland ride in 2017

Education

2008: Bachelor of Science (Computer Science)

University of Alberta

Contact Me

Feel free to email me or reach out to me on Signal.

  1. I certainly hope so! ↩︎
  2. Again, I certainly hope so! ↩︎
  3. This one is sort of hard to explain without a tonne of Amazon-specific context. Suffice to say we have a very large codebase with a complex history, and ensuring that all of the code in use meets a high bar for security and availability is its own special job. ↩︎
  4. It was both better and worse than you'd think! ↩︎
  5. I know, right?! I was so young... ↩︎