About

Welcome! I'm a software engineer who's been building web applications for over 15 years. My journey has taken me through startups, product companies, and SaaS platforms across financial services, health tech, data infrastructure, and more. Through it all, I've maintained one clear focus: delivering working software that makes a difference.

What Drives Me

I'm drawn to the kind of work that makes teams stronger and systems more resilient. That means tackling the foundational improvements such as replacing inefficient search implementations with proper full-text indexing, platform and legacy upgrades, hardening security gaps, or transforming a codebase's architectural patterns so new developers can contribute confidently.

I believe software engineering is about solving real problems for real people, not demonstrating technical cleverness. My job is to understand what needs to happen, communicate the approach clearly, and deliver it in a way that others can maintain and build upon. Readable code beats clever code. Tests that tell a story beat tests that check implementation. Working solutions beat perfect architecture. Documented decisions beat institutional knowledge that lives in peoples heads.

How I Work

I'm proactive about identifying problems before they become critical. When I see a revenue gap, a performance bottleneck, or a documentation void, I investigate, propose a solution, and execute it. I don't wait for perfect specifications, instead, I ask clarifying questions, build iteratively, and course-correct based on feedback.

I value transparency and knowledge-sharing. Whether it's through detailed PR reviews, comprehensive documentation, or writing blog posts that demystify complex topics, I invest in making knowledge accessible. Strong teams aren't built on hero developers; they're built on shared understanding and collective capability.

My Technical Philosophy

I'm a full-stack generalist with deep expertise in Rails and PostgreSQL. I understand the entire system, from database design and query optimization to service layer to front-end interactivity to CI/CD pipeline configuration. I can navigate architectural decisions with a pragmatic eye toward trade-offs and long-term maintainability.

I embrace modern development practices: comprehensive testing, automated linting, observability with proper monitoring, incremental migrations that avoid big-bang rewrites, and feature flags for safe roll-outs. I also embrace AI-assisted development — not as autopilot, but as a force multiplier that lets me move faster while maintaining engineering rigor.

What I Value in Teams

The best teams I've worked with share a few key traits: they communicate clearly and directly, they trust each other to make good decisions, they document their architectural choices, and they treat production issues as learning opportunities rather than blame opportunities. I thrive in environments where initiative is encouraged, where asking "why are we doing it this way?" is welcomed, and where improving developer experience is seen as valuable work.

I don't do leetcode-style interviews - years of public work (GitHub repos dating back to 2013, 100+ blog posts, documented volunteer contributions) offers better evidence of how I think and what I can deliver. Strong technical teams recognize that proven capability matters more than performance on contrived exercises.

Community & Contributions

I contribute to the broader engineering community through writing and open source work. My technical blog draws thousands of monthly readers and has been featured in Ruby Weekly, Short Ruby Newsletter, and Women on Rails. I write about practical problem-solving, architectural decisions, debugging strategies, and career development. I'm also active on LinkedIn and GitHub.