Feb 7, 2023
I’ve been a professional software developer since the early 2000s and an enthusiastic amateur even longer, and a manager of developers since 2019. I’m also deeply interested in organizational dynamics and group consensus: software, like ourselves, lives in a society, and both serves the needs of and serves to help shape that society.
I’m always interested in hearing from people and organizations that I can help, whether that means coming in for a few days to talk about end-to-end testing or joining your organization full-time to help turn an idea into reality.
I live in and around Toronto. I am more than happy to work remotely, and I can probably help your organization learn to integrate remote work if it doesn’t already know how.
I regularly mentor people new to programming, teaching them how to craft working systems. This is less about teaching people to write code and more about teaching them why we care about source control, how to think about configuration, how to and why to automate testing, and how to think about software systems and data flow at a higher level. I strongly believe that software development needs a formal apprenticeship program, and mentoring has done a lot to validate that belief.
As an engineering manager at Ada, I lead a team of engineers to build an internal platform for chat applications. Our goal was to enable growth into new markets, by making it possible to extend Ada’s product in novel ways based on the needs of new customers.
During my tenure the team set out on building an event processing system based on Kafka, intended to decouple the company’s in-house chat frontend from the response generation services and to become the common interface for other customer service platforms, so that Ada could intervene to assist customers via email, phone, and other services our customers might already be using.
In my time with Heroku (and with Salesforce, Heroku’s parent organization), I’ve contributed to the delivery and operation of services that let developers bring their ideas to life on the internet, both as a developer and as a manager. I’ve been involved in maintaining and expanding existing features, exploring and developing new products, and in cultivating my peers and my team as people and as developers.
As an engineering manager (2018 to 2022), I’ve been responsible for building and supporting an effective, unified team across multiple continents. Moving into management was motivated by a desire to act as a force multiplier, which I’ve brought to life through coaching, process management, facilitating ongoing discussions about the direction and health of the team, and through actively being involved in my reports’ progress as developers.
Each of the teams I’ve worked on has been responsible for both developing and operating a mature product, delivered at scale via the internet, to a diverse range of customers. My team has served everyone from single developers working on hobby projects all the way up to billion-dollar enterprises who selected Heroku as their platform of choice for the enterprise.
Those teams have been comprised of everything from unique, hard-to-replace domain experts to interns on their first outing. In order to organize and lead, I take a disciplined approach to communication, emphasizing clarity and empathy. I provide as much flexibility around scheduling as the organization can spare, to enable my teams to work when they’re at their best. And, as my team’s ambassador to the organization, I gather up the disparate and sometimes highly-speculative streams of work in flight to present as a coherent roadmap against organizational goals.
I’ve also been responsible for the huge range of work that Salesforce expects from line management, including performance management and coaching, compensation planning, hiring and interviewing, balancing on-call schedules against burnout and retention risks, and skilling up the team to handle the parts of all of these processes that can be delegated, while keeping their time free to do the things they’re good at as much as is possible.
As a lead developer (2015-2018), I worked on the Heroku build system, which ingests code from end users and deploys that code to applications running on the Heroku platform. As part of that work, we implemented a number of features to control abuse, support language-specific features and needs, and to develop new ways to deploy code to Heroku.
During the five years I was with the company, it grew from a 20-person one-room organization to a healthy, growing two-hundred-person technology company. As an early employee, I had my hand in many, many projects and helped the development team absorb the massive cultural changes that come with growth, while also building a SaaS product that let others realize their dreams. Some highlights:
As the team’s database administrator, I was responsible for balancing concerns about reliability and availability against the need to deliver new services and functional improvements for customers. Alongside the operations team, I handled capacity planning, reliability, outage planning, and performance monitoring. Alongside the development team, I was responsible for designing processes tooling and providing advice on the most effective ways to use MySQL to accomplish their goals.
As an ops toolsmith, I worked extensively on deployment automation and standardizing process for internal services. I created a standard development VM to ensure developers had an environment consistent with reality, I automated packaging and rollout to testing servers, I explored options around platform-as-a-service products to look for fit, and more. As part of this work, I built training materials and ran sessions to teach other developers how to think like a sysadmin, covering Linux, Puppet, virtualization, and other topics.
Riptown Media was an software development company tasked with building and operating a suite of gambling systems for a single client. I was brought on board as a Java developer, and rapidly expanded my role to encompass other fields.
As the primary developer for poker-room back office and anti-fraud tools, I worked with the customer support and business intelligence teams to better understand their daily needs and frustrations, so that I could turn those into meaningful improvements to their tools and processes. These improvements, in turn, lead to measurable changes in the frequency and length of customer support calls, in fraud rates, and in the percieved value of internal customer intelligence.
As a lead developer, my team put together the server half of an in-house casino gaming platform. We worked in tight collaboration with the client team, in-house and third-party testers, and interaction designers, and delivered our first game in under six months. Our platform was meant to reduce our reliance on third-party “white label” games vendors; internally, it was a success. Our game received zero customer-reported defects during its initial run.
You can get in touch by email at owen@grimoire.ca. I’d love to hear from you.