BC

Work

Twenty-five years across clinical research, IoT, applied R&D, healthcare, energy, and now fintech. I've started companies, built a lot of products, and joined a few VC-backed startups on purpose to learn how they work from the inside. The pattern underneath: the harder and less defined the problem, the more I like it. "This is broken, figure it out" is my favourite brief.

Resume → LinkedIn →

  1. Feb 2023 – present

    tastytrade

    Staff Software Engineer · Chicago, IL (remote)

    • Led the OpenTelemetry rollout: shared metrics and tracing libraries, tested and deployed across 30+ Ruby microservices, with the brokerage systems onboarded to Honeycomb.
    • Application and telemetry lead for the move to a new datacenter, running both sites side by side until the numbers matched. Gave a conference talk on it.
    • Upgraded the core brokerage messaging service, written in Elixir/Erlang.
    • Instrumented and diagnosed production performance problems in critical Ruby services, and ran telemetry talks and sharing sessions for the engineering team.
    Talk: De-risking datacenter migrations with observability ↗
  2. Jun 2020 – present

    i-50

    Technical Advisor · Miami, FL

    Bi-weekly calls with an ML startup's engineering team on testing, architecture, and process. The fundamentals, mostly.

  3. 2020 – present

    Window Grille Clips

    Founder

    Reproduction grille clips for vintage Andersen windows, four styles, printed to order. A tiny business, but a real one.

  4. 2020

    Made2print

    Creator & host

    A YouTube channel about 3D printing as a practical tool: design walkthroughs and prints that fix something around the house.

  5. Dec 2018 – Feb 2023

    ConsenSys Mesh

    Senior Software Engineer & Researcher · Brooklyn, NY (remote)

    • Co-led Team Zero, an applied R&D group building community-testable prototypes.
    • Technical lead on the Baseline protocol alongside Microsoft and EY; core maintainer and technical steering committee member after it launched as an OASIS project.
    • Designed, built, and launched Datapult, a first-of-its-kind product for social image sharing on decentralized storage, with an iOS app, website, and Cloudflare backend.
    • Built a zero-knowledge location-privacy prototype in Circom on Sony Spresense hardware.
    • A run of first-of-their-kind launches with artists and musicians, and an open source SDK for rights and royalties on live recordings.
    Team Zero ↗Baseline protocol ↗
  6. Mar 2016 – Dec 2018

    Grand Rounds

    Senior Software & Infrastructure Engineer · San Francisco, CA

    • Tech lead on the time-constrained, business-critical projects.
    • Built the custom EDI data exchange and SSO systems for the largest customers, and ran the SFTP exchange they sent data through.
    • Managed the homebuilt CI and ephemeral-environment system on Docker Swarm, and planned the next platform on Kubernetes, Istio, and Envoy.
    • Created the product planning process for the infrastructure engineering team. On call for production, ran the post-mortems.
  7. 2016 – present

    MadeParts

    Founder

    Hard-to-find parts re-manufactured on demand. Zero inventory, direct digital ordering, low-volume plastic parts nobody else will make.

  8. Sep 2014 – Mar 2016

    Lucid Design Group

    Product Manager, Controls & Integrations · Oakland, CA

    • Managed the integrations between third-party utility and building hardware companies and BuildingOS.
    • Worked with the engineers to design the BuildingOS API, and set up application analytics and user metric reporting.
    • Planned the controls platform and a demand-response pilot with a large utility aggregator.
  9. Jul 2013 – Jul 2014

    IFTTT

    Senior Software Developer, Head of Hardware · San Francisco, CA

    • Created 15 hardware channels in six months, and platform IoT usage went up with them.
    • Specced, built, and launched device channels with Nest, Parrot, Withings, Fitbit, Belkin, Netatmo, Automatic, Lockitron, and others.
    • Replaced the aging Sphinx search with Solr, deployed with Chef on AWS.
  10. May 2012 – Apr 2013

    Belly

    Senior Software Developer, Open Source Manager · Chicago, IL

    • Scaled the core Rails application from 300,000 to over a million users.
    • Co-designed and built the management and monitoring system for 4,000+ in-store terminals.
    • Built the custom reporting database the business analysts worked from, and mined performance and behaviour data with the product directors.
  11. 2010

    Tree Farm Creative

    Founder

    Designed, manufactured, and sold home goods made from renewable materials. My first go at building a brand and a marketplace.

  12. 2008

    Northwestern University Bio-Informatics Core

    Software Engineer · Chicago, IL

    Patient registries, trial-monitoring systems, and a survey authoring platform for clinical research, in Rails.

  13. 2006

    NIH Clinical Center

    Software Engineer

    An informed-consent authoring platform for clinical research, built in Rails back when Ajax was the exciting part.

  14. 2005

    Ratchet Web Design

    Freelance Designer & Developer

    Solo web design and development for a while.

  15. 2000 – 2002

    Guidewalk

    Co-founder & Developer

    A Palm Pilot navigation startup with a few friends. I built the engine that turned vector map art into interactive maps on PalmOS for nine travel guides published with Let's Go.

Education

  1. 2011

    Northwestern University

    BS, Information Systems

  2. 1998 – 2003

    University of Maryland, College Park

    Electrical Engineering

    Where the Solar Decathlon house and the NASA reduced-gravity flights happened.