Introduction

 Welcome

Firstly let me say welcome to my blog. This is a place where I intend to share my ideas about software development and life in general. I intend this to be a place of learning both for myself and my readers. I hope that by reading this you'll be able to glean information that will make you a better software developer and give you an idea some idea of how to take your career to the next level. 

I hope to post regularly and keep this this blog fresh and exciting. If you have ideas for topics or questions, please reach out to me. I intend this to be a two way conversation.

So who am I?

I'm a Principal Software Engineer currently living in Snoqualmie, WA around 30mins from Seattle, WA. I grew up in Adelaide, Australia and lived there until I moved to Seattle in 2008. I never quite found the right role for me in Adelaide. In the 3 positions I held in Adelaide, I never felt that I really had the sort of support and mentorship I needed from a technical perspective. The majority of my learning was online and I found from the very start of my career, I was always the technical leader of my organization.

That changed when I moved to Seattle. I started working for Microsoft and found myself surrounded by people who operated on the same wavelength as me. I felt that I could learn and that I could bounce ideas off other people. It was a safe place giving me the opportunity to grow and develop. It's something I wish I'd done years earlier. Working for a top technology company is something I'd recommend anyone to do while they're young. 

During my time at Microsoft, I started as an entry level Test Engineer on Windows Mobile and worked my way up to a Senior Software Development Engineer. I had the pleasure of working on Windows Phone, Universal Store, Windows Client and Microsoft Support Engineering Group. I worked on the Location Resolution service that Microsoft (likely) still depends on to this day. I wrote two Universal APIs for Windows, one which I ported across to Android and IOS. I was the first engineer in our group to setup a fully automated cross platform build system to support Windows, Android and IOS. I thoroughly enjoyed my time but all good things.

After around 10 years I realized that the group I was in was going nowhere. It was time to find something else. I wasn't specifically looking outside of Microsoft but after 10 years, I figured it was time to look outside as well as inside. I found myself interviewing at Zulily and Amazon. I got offers from both positions and accepted a role at Zulily. Why Zulily? Simply put, the interview process was far better and I felt myself a better fit.

Zulily brought a set of new challenges and opportunities. I was still working with great engineers but I was now much closer to my customer. There was far greater impact in the work that I was doing. I was running huge systems and leading teams doing great things.

I started out in Competitive Price Analysis. This was a huge distributed system that scaled up to over 3,000 VMs at peak. I drove a project completely rewriting the back end bringing our monthly costs down from over $20k/month to less than $1k/month.

More recently, I've been running the Inventory Management system where we're responsible for managing around $2bn in sales each year. It's a high pressure environment where every minute of downtime could cost the company over $4k in lost sales.

On top of that, I'm responsible for guiding and directing an engineering team of over 50 engineers working on the Zulily backend platform. If you want a job, let me know!

Outside of work?

Outside of work I'm a father of a 5 year old boy and an 8 year old girl. I love cars and own a 2010 Ferrari California which is a great family car. I enjoy the outdoors. I snowboard in the winter and enjoy hiking in the summer. I enjoy video games, especially large open world adventures with Fallout being one of my all time favorite series.