Intro

Currently I’m a backend engineer at Red Rover. Previously, I was a staff DevOps engineer at Degreed. I am passionate about making dev work more enjoyable by making things easier to use and faster to set up, change, and deploy.

I live in the triangle area of central NC where I play lots golf and take the occasional trip to the beach or the mountains, or hop on a plane to go skiing in the winter.

Summary

Backend-focused full stack .NET engineer capable of owning the entire SDLC

  • work closely with stakeholders to deliver value quickly using agile development practices
  • design systems for continuous delivery and continuous deployment, from code to infrastructure to deployment strategy
  • infrastructure as code with Terraform
  • continuous delivery pipelines with Github actions and Azure DevOps
  • database design and deployment automation – code first or database first, EF Core, SSDT, or just plain SQL scripts. Experience with Red Gate SQL Compare tools.
  • local dev environment setup and maintenance – Docker and Kubernetes, (dev|test)containers
  • experienced administering Kubernetes and developing/deploying applications to multitenant clusters
  • all the required automated testing – unit, integration, and e2e testing
  • using TDD to ensure high coverage and quality
  • logging, metrics, and APM from day one with Datadog
  • mentoring others on all of the above
  • enough Angular experience to build front-ends with some CSS/designer help

Preferred tools

  • C#, .NET 6+ and ASP.NET Core, NCrunch, Docker, Kubernetes/AKS, SQL Server, Redis, PostgreSQL, Entity Framework, Terraform, Github Actions, Azure Pipelines, Datadog, Jetbrains IDEs and performance tools

Other daily drivers

  • IIS, Azure App Service, Web jobs, Service Bus, .NET Framework, ASP.NET MVC

Tech I’ve used at other jobs

  • Angular, RavenDB, AWS EC2, Elastic Beanstalk

Experience

Red Rover - Senior Software Engineer - December 2024 - present

  • Help onboard to Datadog and act as Datadog SME

Degreed - Staff Engineer I - March 2022 - November 2024

Degreed - Backend Developer - October 2019 - March 2022

  • DevOps team - May 2020 to present

    In early 2020 we identified the need to start a DevOps transformation as we weren’t releasing often enough and had lots of opportunities to improve developer experience and productivity. Having a dedicated DevOps team is a bit of an anti-pattern, and the hope is that we will dissolve when our mission is complete. We want to modernize hosting and deployments to enable the fast flow that DevOps aims to achieve.

    I coordinate directly with the VP of DevSecOps and the architects to make sure that we are aligned and working together toward our long term goals of supporting a loosely coupled, global application that can be hosted in multiple clouds and continuously deployed.

    My team also provides SRE support to the rest of the engineering org. We are responsible for monitoring the health of the core platform and providing support to teams that need help with specific troubleshooting. I have developed a solid understanding of debugging systems through the use of logging, metrics, and APM via Datadog and am skilled at diagnosing issues and adding new data as needed to make SRE work more sustainable.

    • 2024 - .NET migration
      • Designed and deployed infrastructure migration strategy for upgrading main web application from .NET Framework to .NET 8 using YARP and ASP.NET Core with the strangler pattern. Allowed a no-downtime incremental migration of over 1000 API and MVC endpoints.
      • Consult with .NET migration team on challenges arising during the migration of endpoints from .NET Framework to ASP.NET Core 8.
      • Migrate nearly 20 .NET 8 apps from Windows App Service to Kubernetes.
    • 2023 - improving local development and speed of innovation
      • Improved local monitoring for Redis with MiniProfiler to detect duplicate calls. Set up Seq to improve the local logging experience.
      • Participated in and supported migration of Elasticsearch hosting from VMs to Kubernetes using Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes. Set up monitoring and automated deployments for dozens of ECK clusters.
      • Reduced provisioning time for new services from days to hours by creating reusable Github workflows, Helm charts, and Nuget packages. Lead training sessions on use of these tools to empower teams to own their deployments and configuration.
      • Researched and implemented managed workload identity to allow applications to access infrastructure without needing to use secrets. No more secret rotation or manual configuration changes! Everything is managed by a combination of Helm and Terraform.
      • Continued to advocate for and demonstrate automated testing and TDD to allow increased speed and innovation while ensuring high quality output.
      • Simplified management of local development environments with Docker Compose for running and managing all infrastructure dependencies. This includes Redis, Elasticsearch, SQL Server, and a custom messaging solution to allow the two data stores to stay in sync using the existing code and infrastructure. Provide automated tooling to set up and maintain local environments whenever new changes are submitted that affect the data or schemas. Produce and execute training and provide support for the roll out of the improved local development experience.
      • Designed overall modernization of development and deployment practices, mainly consisting of deploying more parts of the system from version control instead of synchronizing from a shared development environment. Removed cumbersome manual steps from various processes including database and localization deployments.
    • 2022 - broad improvements to developer experience, promoted to Staff engineer for contributions to long term improvements and leadership
      • Constantly searched for and made changes to improve the speed of deployments, tests, and PR checks to allow developers to spend less time waiting.
      • Implemented hosting and deployment patterns that enabled continuous delivery in new services using Kubernetes, Docker, Github Actions, and Terraform. Train teams on how to build, operate, and maintain CD pipelines and implement applications using patterns that are compatible with CD like backwards compatibility and versioning.
      • Guided migration of primary application hosting from the deprecated Azure Cloud Services to the more modern Azure App Services. This required extensive optimization of network chattiness as App Services were a bit more resource constrained. Specifically this included optimizing the way the app uses Redis. I implemented a layered caching strategy using Redis pub/sub and in-memory caching to reduce the amount of Redis calls by 50%. This improved latency of the web requests by nearly 50%.
      • Supported a dozen product teams as they create and deploy new software components. Educated on building pipelines, automated test suites, and monitoring and logging. Provided containerized development environments for all new services.
      • Automated deployment of Elasticsearch changes.
      • Automated creation of SQL Server container whenever database changes were merged. This container is used for local integration and acceptance testing of database or Entity Framework code changes. Additionally this container is used in PR checks to speed them up when there are no database changes. Rather than building the database from scratch we can reuse the existing image to run tests against.
    • 2021 - planning for .NET migration and modular monolith
      • Identified and fixed performance issues that resulted in a 50% reduction in global response times. Cost savings from the change were nearly $4,000 (or about 40%) per month in web server compute costs.
      • Member of architecture guild and subsequent architecture board. Frequent RFC contributor.
      • Consulted on and supported .NET Framework -> .NET 5/6 migration of application components.
      • Supported horizontal scale effort through automation and back-end code contribution. Added ability to deploy schema changes to an arbitrary number of databases defined in Cosmos DB documents.
      • Refreshed database automation from Powershell to C# to support the ability to more easily consume .NET APIs and be highly tested.
      • Participated in planning for modularizing the monolith and building event-driven architecture.
      • Explored and recommended approaches to improve database deployments by leveraging backwards compatible changes.
      • Designed, implemented, and educated peers on new integration testing framework to allow Entity Framework code changes for .NET migration to be highly tested.
    • 2020 - modernizing deployments and monitoring
      • Started containerizing applications and set up initial POC of running the stack in Kubernetes.
      • Championed and executed migration from self-hosted TeamCity to a combination of Github Actions and Azure Pipelines.
      • Reduced deployment times from 50-90% by using “build once, deploy many” and blue-green deployments.
      • Set up monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for all development and production environments in Datadog. Provide support to teams desiring to set up their own detailed dashboards and monitoring. Serve as Datadog SME.
      • Provided tier 2 SRE support as required. Diagnosed, triaged, and fixed high severity issues with urgency.
      • Developed database automation enabling use of the same tools for managing local, remote, and production databases. Added fully automated database pipeline that removed the need for manually running scripts during releases.

  • Architecture team - October 2019 to May 2020

    • Planned for .NET Framework -> .NET 5 migrations.
    • Participated in beginning of large-scale database schema refactoring.

Relias - Senior Software Engineer - March 2018 to October 2019

Relias - Software Engineer - March 2017 to March 2018

  • Lead team developing apps in ASP.NET Core + Angular to allow medical clients to administer pre-hire assessments to nurses.
  • Co-lead backend chapter and regularly presented on ways to improve testability, architecture, and maintainability of our services.
  • Developed initial implementation of message broker strategy to allow dev teams to communicate with other services asynchronously and reliably. This strategy was proven in production and quickly reached >100,000 messages daily.

InspectionXpert - April 2013 to March 2017

  • Maintain and extend more than a half-dozen CAD integrations that automate data extraction from engineering drawings.
  • Bring a new integrated SaaS product to market that allows quality managers to have real-time visibility into their quality process. Data previously extracted from engineering drawings with other InspectionXpert products can be uploaded with one click.
  • Learn about CI/CD by setting up Jenkins to build all of our products and automatically deploy to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFront.

Extracurricular activities

  • Learning functional programming
    • F#
    • Elixir - after being a .NET dev for so long, learning Elixir has been eye-opening to say the least.
  • Domain driven design, CQRS, and event sourcing
    • I have various   repositories in different states of incompleteness that implement these patterns. I enjoy tinkering with these ideas without much sense of purpose other than to be armed with the knowledge to apply these concepts in my real work.
  • Completed Udi Dahan’s Advanced Distributed Systems Design course.
  • Golf - In a past life I was an aspiring PGA golf professional. I realized that I’d rather continue golf as a leisure activity and I still attempt to play good golf. Currently I’m about a 4 handicap once the rust gets knocked off in the spring.
  • Skiing - I was introduced to skiing on a work trip and fell in love. Since taking up the sport seriously in 2019 I’ve had the privilege of skiing over 100 days in New York and a few days in Tahoe, Utah, and Vermont.