About this website

This simple website is designed to be an engineering notebook of sorts. It’s not really a blog but more of a place to write engineering notes or various ideas that are helpful to me and perhaps others. For more information on why I created this site and the tools I’m using please visit this page.

The website is created and managed using Jekyll and hosted for free on GitHub Pages. If you encounter any issues or you have suggestions for ways I can improve the site please file an issue here. Website monitoring is done through Uptime Butler and there’s a public uptime history here.

About me

Professionally

For the past 15 years I’ve been heavily immersed in the healthcare, automotive, and general IT verticals, providing innovative technology solutions and leading technology teams. I’m incredibly passionate about what I do and attempt to inject my enthusiasm and love for technology in all those around me.

I started my career in 2000 and spent four years building enterprise-level, database-driven Web applications. I worked for two different companies during this timeframe and much of my work involved parsing large text files to generate online dynamic courseware. I also worked on several high profile projects in the e-Learning space with one spanning the efforts of the Chinese Ministry of Education and the United States Department of Education.

In 2004 I began working as a senior developer for a small company building dynamic websites in the automotive industry. I spent five years at Dealerskins helping grow the company from 300 websites to 2,200 websites in 2008. When I left I was managing a staff of ten people including programmers, quality assurance analysts, and database administrators.

I left Dealerskins in 2009 to help form an automotive startup company focused on big data solutions. I served Dataium as Chief Technology Officer from December 2009 through December 2014. My role at Dataium involved managing the technology staff which included systems, developers/programmers, and database administrators. I was fortunate to lead the technology vision and to help build the entire technology stack from a blank sheet of paper. It was an amazing challenge from day one. Some of our accomplishments include engineering an Apache Hadoop-based platform which processed hundreds of gigabytes every day into a data warehouse well into the terabyte size. We also created a Web Services system using Linux, Node.js, and MySQL (later MongoDB) which processed over 3.3 billion HTTP transactions in March, 2015.

Dataium was sold to IHS in March 2015.

In May 2015 I started a new journey with high-tech healthcare firm, NextGxDx. My role as Vice President of Engineering involves hands-on programming and infrastructure management, product management, and leading the amazing engineering team. We are reinventing how people think about and interact with the genetics testing research and ordering process.

In my overall strategy of building high performance teams and managing enterprise-level projects I could be described as a “cohesion warrior.” I strive each and every day to challenge those around me to build the absolute best software for our customers. This involves coordinating efforts from sales, marketing, executive management, product development, customer support, and ultimately the folks writing code, to ensure the best possible technology experience is delivered to our customers. I have a learned ability to communicate across an entire enterprise, from executive management and owners to customer support, bringing teams together to solve difficult business problems.

Whether it involves writing code or leading teams I aim to make a positive difference in the lives of those around me.

Personally

When I’m not immersing myself in all things technology I enjoy spending time with my family (wife and two sons), reading about business, leadership and science fiction, shooting at the local range, mountain biking, and extreme fitness. At least, that’s the short list.