Jan 2020 – May 2022 · 2 yrs 4 mos

• Continued leadership in backend architecture discussions
• Worked in the leadership and planning of Goliath: a multi-year effort involving all engineers to rebuild our backend and significantly upgrade our frontend.
• Backend was rewritten from a Python 2 monolith to Go services
• Nearly all communication with the backend services was via GraphQL
• I wrote about Goliath on the Khan Engineering blog and spoke about it at GopherCon 2021.
• The initial and biggest phase completed in August 2021, landing on time based on June 2020 forecast
• Built custom tooling to help with that planning
• Migrated a collection of blogs to a single blog.khanacademy.org site
• Led the definition of our open source policy
• Led the engineering blog (providing editorial guidance and help through the process), plus wrote several of the blog posts
• Produced roughly 60 episodes of the podcast version of the Homeroom with Sal / Khan Academy Ed Talks livestreams

Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 · 2 yrs

• Organized the backend guild
• Approver on dozens of backend architecture decisions
• Helped define common development process used across teams
• Introduced Jira to the org and administered it to match our development process
• Introduced Confluence and defined documentation organization both within Engineering and in the rest of the org

Feb 2017 – Jan 2018 · 11 mos

• Project lead for the infrastructure team, with a side of process work and continued engineering management. Introduced the architecture decision process that remained in use for the rest of my tenure.

Apr 2016 – Feb 2017 · 10 mos

• Manager of engineers on the Web Frontend team with a side of process improvement work.

May 2015 – Apr 2016 · 11 mos

• Frontend (with some full-stack work) engineer working on the Khan Academy site. The largest portion of this time was spent as the engineering lead for the LearnStorm 2016 challenge, a math challenge for children in grades 3-12.

Jul 2017 – Nov 2019 · 2 yrs 4 mos

• Author of middle grade (8-12 years of age) fiction, including the 11 Quests series.

Dec 2012 – Apr 2015 · 2 yrs 4 mos

• In 2015, I was the lead engineer/architect for Adobe Preview CC which allows users to preview their Photoshop designs on mobile devices.
• Prior to that, I was a senior engineer working on the Brackets open source code editor built for modern web design. Brackets is distributed as a desktop application (based on Chromium) that is built using modern web development techniques coupled with a small bit of native code. I was heavily involved in editor extensions infrastructure, the HTML live editing feature and a variety of other features. I also helped the team streamline our workflow with kanban.

Jul 2011 – Dec 2012 · 1 yr 5 mos

• I was involved in qualitative and quantitative research that informed roadmaps and product plans for Firefox developer tools. As we shipped the tools, I wrote blog posts and produced screencasts to help spread the word about the new features.
• In 2012, Mozilla expanded significantly into mobile and "apps". I managed another product manager and the two of us worked to identify gaps in our developer ecosystem and define requirements to fill those gaps.

Jul 2010 – Jun 2011 · 11 mos

• Responsible for the people, project and product management for the new developer tools team at Mozilla. We built the Web Console feature that shipped in Firefox 4, and laid the groundwork for a great collection of tools shipping in later releases of Firefox.

Jan 2009 – Jul 2010 · 1 yr 6 mos

• Development and leadership for Mozilla's Bespin project to build a browser-based code editor.

Nov 2007 – Oct 2008 · 11 mos

• My position at SitePen was a combination of product management, project management and software development. I was responsible for the launch of the SitePen Support product, and the Dojo Toolbox and Paver open source projects. I managed the development of these projects, and often contributed directly to the development as well.

Jul 2006 – Oct 2007 · 1 yr 3 mos

• Software development for Peakflow X, an enterprise network behavioral analysis and security alerting product. My work has covered various parts of the system, largely focused on the web and web services tier. I have also worked on parts of the command line interface of our customized operating system.

Jan 2005 – Sep 2007 · 2 yrs 8 mos

• Launched TurboGears, an open source web development toolkit. Created multiple revenue streams (self-published DVD, web hosting revenue, book published by Prentice Hall, consulting). Also developed a unique RSS news reader.

Mar 2003 – Dec 2004 · 1 yr 9 mos

• The largest part of my work at JSTOR was in leading the architecture and development of a Java Swing application for managing the process by which new content enters JSTOR's repository of scholarly journals (more than 15 million pages when I was there). I worked extensively with Hibernate, ant, JUnit and many other Java-based tools, and I developed my own data binding framework for Swing. I was also involved in maintenance and ongoing development of the legacy Perl interface.

Dec 2001 – Feb 2003 · 1 yr 2 mos

• I managed a team of software developers working on a sophisticated job search website with a large amount of traffic. The Java- and Perl-based system handled a continuous flow of data from job seekers, employers posting jobs and newspaper classified ad systems that would feed into CareerSite's database. CareerSite powered the jobs sites of many newspapers across the US.

Nov 2000 – Dec 2001 · 1 yr 1 mo

Mar 1999 – Nov 2000 · 1 yr 8 mos

May 1998 – Mar 1999 · 10 mos

Sep 1997 – May 1998 · 8 mos

Jul 1996 – Sep 1997 · 1 yr 2 mos

Jul 1995 – Jul 1996 · 1 yr

Dec 1994 – Jul 1995 · 7 mos