Projects

This will eventually be a comprehensive list of all of the projects I've worked on over the years going back in time as you scroll down.

Philbot & This Portfolio Site

This was a fun project that I knocked out in a weekend. First I put together a vitepress site and added some details about past projects, experience, and a short bio with some fun stories. What's nice about vitepress is the documentation is all generated from markdown which make it easy to write and also easy for AI to ingest, I used the OpenAI Embeddings API to generate embeddings from the md files which is all stored in a sqlite db and then thats fed in the Grok prompt with gaurd rails defined so that it doesn't make up stuff and sticks to what it knows based on the info I proved here.

Shipcode: Scaling Globally

The first customer onboarded to Shipcode was a fitness fasion brand from Australia that had stores in Australia New Zealand Singapore and the US. We needed to still be able to handle low latency real time collaboration between opposite sides of the world.

Shipcode: Documentation & AI

My team at shipcode also leveraged comprehensive documentation to train an AI assistant within Shipcode, enabling it to manipulate data effectively for user interactions. The training process utilized pre-existing, well-structured documentation to empower the AI to modify specific data properties dynamically and extract specific components as needed, delivering tailored responses and functional changes. This approach yielded impressive results, enhancing user experience and enabling them to just talk to an AI assitant in natural language to make changes to their site or app.

Shipcode: Monitoring, Stability, & Security

I implemented real-time threat detection using Falco to monitor runtime security for containers and hosts in our AWS EKS cluster. Following external penetration testing, I refined Falco rules to reduce false positives and align with our threat model. I performed system hardening, including least privilege principles, network policies, and pod security standards, and documented these steps, mapping them to SOC2 controls (e.g., CC6.1, CC6.6) and PCI DSS requirements (e.g., Requirement 6).

I conducted load testing and configured autoscaling for Knative microservices, enabling scale-to-zero to optimize costs and implementing autoscaling with panic scaling to handle load spikes. Karpenter was used for efficient EKS node scaling. I set up logging, tracing, and monitoring for services and Kafka topics using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and SigNoz to provide logs and alerting. Additionally, I migrated microservices from a shared RDS instance to individual Aurora PostgreSQL instances for improved isolation and performance.

Shipcode: Development, Testing, Deployment, and CI/CD

I enjoyed implementing GitHub Actions workflows for pull requests (PRs), enabling developers to add a label to deploy the full stack to a shared development EKS cluster. The workflow built only the components affected by changes in the monorepo, using the latest from the main branch for the rest. This allowed each PR to be tested independently before approval and merging. Another workflow then tested the merged changes against production configuration and sanitized production data. I also automated the release process, enabling the team to perform multiple weekly production releases. This improved release cadence and reduced the time from feature request or bug identification to solution delivery by approximately 40 times.

Shipcode: Developer Tooling Overhaul

I need to add all the cool stuff we did with Nx, Pulumi, and other things here.

Shipcode: Real Time Collaboration

I led the Shipcode engineering team, collaborating with the Design and Sales teams to define requirements for a microservice managing user cursor position, user selection, and simultaneous multi-user change merging. I worked with engineers to prioritize delivery and deployment, ensuring efficient implementation.

Shipcode: from 0-1

I assembled a core team of three of the company's top engineers, and together, we embarked on a comprehensive rewrite of the codebase. This effort focused on delivering a scalable, reliable product that aligned with the vision articulated by the CEO and CTO, transforming conceptual goals into a tangible, high-quality solution. There is a lot to add here, Domain Driven Design, CQRS Architecture, Event Drive Microservices, Angular, Nest, Next, Azure, AWS, GCP, CosmoDB, Postgres, Nest, Next, WebRTC, we were moving quickly and able to rip out anything that didn't serve us and put in its place somethings that did.

Branding Brand: Flagship Integrations

I was initially appointed as a Senior Engineering Manager at Branding Brand, tasked with leading a team responsible for developing integrations with external services for Flagship, the company's primary product at the time. Within my first six months, I observed significant challenges, including the dissolution of the R&D team and the departure of the product manager and several key engineers. Upon closer examination, it became evident that the product, as originally presented, relied heavily on non-functional demoware and lacked a robust architectural foundation. Recognizing the need for a strategic overhaul, I spearheaded an initiative to rebuild the product from first principles, prioritizing maintainability and flexibility.

Adapify: Home Test Pro

Adapifies expansion into water and air quality testing.

Adapify: RxSoil Algorithm to AI

Recommendations Algorithm was rewritten for generative AI responses.

Adapify: Laboratory SaaS

Laboratory D2C SaaS

Adapify: Adapify Sports

Youth Sport Team/Club/League SaaS and payments platform.

Adapify: We Evolve Us

Local Social Network for crowdfunding and collaboration to make communitues great

Microsoft: Sands Casino Hack Response

FBI, Treasury, Homeland Security, a handful of Microsofts top Security people and me.

Microsoft: Nokia Acquisition

Led the migration effort for that parts of Nokia that Microsoft didn't buy and MSIT came in and absorbed what's left.

Microsoft: Adobe Email Down

I was called it to quickly migrate Adobe to the cloud after their on-prem email servers failed and caused their corporate email to be down for multiple days.

Microsoft: Netflix in 2013

Worked with Netflix IT team through setup, configuration, and deployment of Office 365, AzureAD, and ADFS.

Microsoft: 3M azure cloud storage and OneDrive

Worked with key stakeholder to plan, prep, and migrate 3M's data to Azure Cloud Storage and OneDrive.

Microsoft: Nielsen 50,000 person Cloud Migration

Continued to develop automation scripts and smoothly transitioned a 50,000-user organization from on-premises to cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft: Novell 12,000 person Cloud Migration

Planned, prepped, and scripted solutions to seamlessly migrate a 12,000-user organization from on-premises systems to cloud-based infrastructure.

Pheon Technologies Group

In 2009, I saw a Microsoft Research video of a touch screen table with infinite points of contact. After seeing that and deciding that I needed one in my apartment. I found NUI(Natural User Interface) group and open source project made up of a couple hundred other like minded individuals around the work attempting to build somethings similar. Community Core Vision was the software to enable multi touch devices using FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection). This was acheived by placing infrared led strips around the edges of an enlightened acrylic panel, to flood the panel with light. Whenever anything came in contact with the surface that would reflect to the other side where there was a modified PS3 eye cam with an infrared filter to visually pick up the blobs of light being reflected, then Community Core Vision would translate those light blobs into touch input. I also helped with organizing a group buy for a manufacturing run of enlightened acrylic panels for building the devices.

At the time I dismantled my HDTV to pull the LCD matrix out of it, fun fact: LCD doesn't block infrared light so it's kind of the perfect solution to putting image/screen just under the panel that is recognizing the user input from the surface and with a little bit of software and calibration the whole thing works seamlessly.