Startups, code, and some other stuff too.

tl;dr

 

Strengths

Futuristic - Restorative - Learner - Achiever - Strategic

These aren't made up. Find your strengths.

 

Early Days

Kent State University alumnus.

Senior Developer at New Media Communications. Lead Developer for Bush for President (2000), Bloomberg for Mayor (2001), the Republican National Committee, and numerous other GOP candidates and organizations. Don't read too much into the politics -- there are so many reasons I'm not in that world anymore.

Consultant at E-merging Technologies Group. Met my mentor, worked with great people, had a blast doing so. You can say they prepared me for what was next. Speaking of...

 

Startups

Founded BlueEye Systems (CEO). Co-Founded Horner Networks (CTO) and SendReceive (CTO). All bootstrapped. All profitable. Horner Networks and SendReceive are still in operation to this day.

Co-Founded Spent (CEO/CTO). Got accepted into the inaugural class of The Iron Yard accelerator. Raised an angel round. Rebranded as Relify and pivoted into the awesome world of machine learning. Failed. Learned. Got stronger.

Joined ChartSpan (CTO). Engineered an awesome vision. Worked with awesome people. Ran into an instance of incompatibility and decided to move on.

Joined Keen IO. Spent time in both Data Science and Software Engineering before being promoted to VP of Engineering. Worked with some of the most amazing people I've ever met. Became a better human. Led the team through acquisition before deciding it was time to say goodbye.

Joined GitHub for the opportunity to build and lead a team focused on the infrastructure side of GitHub's unique data challenges. Currently leading our Code Search efforts.

 

Code

Java hacker since college. Lived too many years in the world of ASP, C#, ASP.NET and SQL Server. Escaped. Is it ironic that I ended up working with the very people who designed and built all of these things after Microsoft acquired GitHub? /shrug

Fell in love with Ruby, Scala and Objective-C. Found my love of programming again. Picked up Python along the way. You know, because data.

Have been working with cloud technologies since they hit the interwebs. AWS and I know each other well. Said hello to Azure and Google Cloud along the way, too.

Dove into the world of open source head first. Became obsessed with Lucene, OpenNLP, Solr, Hadoop and just about every other open source big data/search technology.

Got the itch to hack on some cryptographic libraries, OpenPGP and BouncyCastle in particular. Thanks Ed.

Currently diving into Rust while not so quietly wondering where this awesome language has been all my life.

 

Other stuff

Father to three awesome children. Youngest two are twins. All you parents of multiples know what I'm talking about. No, I don't need to say it.

Husband to the best wife a man could ask for. See above.

Used to perform ridiculous feats of endurance. Finished the American Triple-T three times. Finished countless other short/long distance events in between.

Raced Across America in 6 days, 18 hours and 33 minutes with seven other lunatics to raise money for Akron Children's Hospital. Slept for a week.

Decided a week of misery riding across the country wasn't enough, so I raced 928 miles across the West in 66 hours and 18 minutes with my good friend to raise money for the LeBron James Family Foundation's Wheels for Education program. Slept for a day or two before watching my NBA team win its first championship on my 39th birthday. Speaking of...

Born and raised in Northeast Ohio. Tortured by Cleveland sports as far back as I can remember. This space used to be occupied by the phrase "Please guys, just one before I die", but we got one. I don't know what that means for my life expectancy.

Resident of the best kept secret in the South. Seriously, this place is awesome.

Also, I like craft beer. I like it a lot. A lot a lot.

 

Hit me up

Twitter. GitHub. LinkedIn. AngelList. You're welcome to try guessing my Gmail address if you really must. Hint: it may or may not have something to do with my first and last name.

 

Peace.

 

Last updated September 12, 2020 @ 11:29