A Brief History of Me
I'll try to keep things high level so you don't get bored.
- Born in Europe, grew up in the US. Currently living in Europe.
- Been programming since 12, using Linux since 13. (over 20 years of Linux. Dang, I feel old!)
- Cut my teeth with open source contributions to things like KDE.
- Got lucky. Landed by dream job straight out of university: Trolltech (makers of Qt, acquired by Nokia) in Oslo, Norway.
- Role: Founding the first SDET team, and left the company as the QA Manager for Qt Europe
- Duration: 5 years 3 months (2006-2011)
- Tech: C++ and Ruby (Rails)
- Day to day: Building bespoke CI solutions to handle testing on 10+ platforms. Release Management. Organizing and automating tests.
- Expanded my horizons. Moved to London, UK to work at the world's largest platform for scientific
research: Mendeley (acquired by Elsevier)
- Tech: C++ and Ruby (Rails)
- Duration: 1 year 9 months (2011-2012)
- Role: Team/Tech lead of QA/Support department.
- Day to day: Pivoting/training team from manual testers to SDET. Automating tests. Tackling technical debt through kaizen.
- London is the home of Fintech, so let's try that. Joined a company building a high speed trading
system named Spreadpointe. (now gone, absorbed into sister company)
- Tech: C++, Python, Postgres, Docker.
- Duration: 2 year 7 months (2012-2015)
- Role: Came in as QA/SDET manager and left as VP Engineering
- Day to day: Implementing CI/CD systems. Software architecture and development.
- Let's build software that helps banks talk with government (RegTech). First hire at Suade.
- Tech: Python, Postgres, Docker.
- Duration: 2 year 6 months (2015-2017)
- Role: Came in as VP Engineering, left as CTO
- Day to day: Core architecture. Anything technical really. Building technical team from the ground up.
- Time to spread my wings and fly. Going remote and contracting. Founded Tandem Engineering.
- Tech: Python, Postgres, Node.js, Docker, Go, Kotlin
- Duration: Ongoing over 2 years. (2017-Now)
- Role: Founder
- Day to day: CTO for hire. Some favorite projects:
- Technical vetting and team building on behalf of SV company for placement at top tier companies (FAANG and more)
- Cloud infrastructure and automation for a London biotech startup. Infrastructure as code, with a Docker focus.
- Stand-in CTO for DC based AI/ML startup for legal tech. Tech architect and hands-on work for MVP onwards.