I am a software developer, technical speaker and open source enthusiast. For many years now I've been self-employed, building commercial software tools focused on background jobs, a popular pattern for scaling transactional processing.
Focused on the design and development of our Sidekiq and Faktory background job systems. As of 2025, I have over 2000 customers and annual sales approaching $10m/year. I have done this with no employees, only me.
I manage and develop the Sidekiq and Faktory open source projects along with the Sidekiq Pro, Sidekiq Enterprise, and Faktory Enterprise commercial products. All available for sale at https://billing.contribsys.com.
Lead developer and head of DevOps for TheClymb.com, an online retailer focused on outdoor adventure. In this role, I was responsible for the health and stability of the website infrastructure, building scalable systems with Ruby and OSS tools and led a team of developers monitoring the e-commerce platform. TheClymb.com was Sidekiq's first customer. Sample technologies: Ruby, Rails, Redis, RSpec, Sidekiq, MySQL.
Moved to San Francisco and did independent Ruby consulting for 6 months before joining C5.
Developer and project lead for customer engagements with Carbon Five, a web development services company. In this role, I advised clients on proper development process, building scalable systems with Ruby and OSS tools and led a team of developers building software (usually Rails web sites, e.g. http://manilla.com) for clients. Sample technologies: jruby, redis, rspec, heroku, jquery.
Ruby and systems developer. I led development of our 2nd and 3rd generation message queue processing systems, automated system provisioning, content generation and caching. Worked with technologies like Varnish, nginx, Passenger, thin, Sinatra, EventMachine, Rails, Ruby, Cassandra, Solr, RabbitMQ, postgresql, ec2 and Chef. I pushed a lot of open source based on my work to Github. Spoke at LoneStarRubyConf and Austin on Rails during this time on various technical subjects.
I spent 15 months building FiveRuns' Manage and Dash (unreleased) services. I personally focus on the lower-level portions of our service, building http-based services, data processing via message queuing and performance tuning both Ruby code and MySQL schema. I've contributed to many open source projects during this time and spoken at several conferences and user groups in the US and Europe including Rubyconf and Railsconf Europe.
My long-term focus at IBM (which acquired Webify in 8/06) is the design and implementation of service-oriented applications based on IBM's Business Services Fabric middleware. Since these applications are different from traditional monolithic applications, there is a real need to design and document how to build these applications.
Accomplishments
Cornell University, BS and M.Eng, Computer Science
I have given talks at RubyConf, RailsConf, RailsConf Europe, OSON and several regional user groups.
In my spare time, I like working on numerous OSS projects and ride my e-bikes. See my GitHub page for more details.