Hi, I’m a software engineer at IVP, a venture capital firm. I work from home in Duxbury, Massachusetts known for its beach and oysters. About once a quarter I travel back to San Francisco, where I lived for 10 years.
I previously worked at infra/fintech startups where I developed iOS and Android apps in React Native and helped build testbot, a Continuous Integration tool for private GitHub monorepos.
Before the startups, I worked for 10 years at thoughtbot, a software design and development consulting firm. I was a developer on Ruby on Rails projects in our Boston office and later became our Chief Marketing Officer. I moved to San Francisco to open our new office there and help hire and manage our initial team of designers and developers.
I love evaluating Platforms as a Service and have shared my experiences comparing Fly.io, Heroku, Northflank, Railway, and Render.
My preferred software development tools are Go, Postgres, HTTP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. My web apps are structured as DNS to CDN to Origin. I’ve written a lot of Ruby.
A few of my Go projects include testbot (mentioned above), a static site generator, a process manager, and a script for deleting all your Twitter likes.
I wrote a Ruby clone of Heroku Dataclips with Sinatra. I love the script file guard trick. I’m an advocate for Postgres-backed job queues in Ruby or any language.
A few quick Postgres tips include concat_ws, creating indexes concurrently, and debugging slow queries.
A few quick testing tips include four-phase test, mystery guests, and stubs and spies.
I try hard to limit dependencies; thin API clients is one example. A fancier way to describe software design aesthetic is deep modules, simple interfaces.
I maintain scripts and dotfiles to configure my laptop. A few quick Vim tips include formatting SQL on file save, running SQL queries, running tests, and searching projects.
I typically manage projects on a kanban board and a Git monorepo. I’ve found the north star metric and retention curves to be useful tools for understanding and driving user engagement.
I’m an angel investor in Electric Air, Reforge, and Underdog Sports.