Post-Mid-Life Routine

Welcome to my site and thanks for stopping by!

I’ve learned many new things over the past year. It’s been a simultaneously exciting and humbling experience for me. If you’ve been blessed to have survived the tech downturn unscathed, you may not be familiar with the path I, and many others, have been walking.

I’ve been head-down and project-focused in the software production business for over 20 years. The longest I was ever unemployed during that stretch was 1 month. Until the past year, that is. I’ve tended to stay with companies for the long haul, though not necessarily in the same role for extended periods.

My latest tenure (at EA) saw me expand my role 4 times in 8.5 years. I joined as a mobile client SDK engineer in a senior role. From there, I took over the technical direction of a major new SDK within the development platform organization. I then made the jump to management with an initial team of 5, expanding to 18. Ultimately, I held a director role over a cross-functional, full-stack team of 25+ engineers and managers.

After separating from EA, I was initially stressed about the lack of opportunities to jump back into the fray. I had a few extended conversations, mostly with gaming companies, which ultimately didn’t lead to new roles. After a while, I took the lack of traction as a sign that I should try some new things. So I did!

I’ve spent most of my career on the client, on just about every client platform you can name. While I directed and managed a server team for the final year of my career at EA, I wasn’t actively coding. I hadn’t seen the right opportunity for digging deep as an engineer on the backend. I decided to change that.

I’ve been building some portfolio projects and generally expanding my hands-on knowledge on the backend. I built a REST web service in Golang using net/http. I defined and documented the service with OpenAPI 3. It has credential-based auth with refresh token rotation using JWT. I built middleware for request logging and to protect the secured routes. I’ve written database providers for Postgres, Couchbase, and MongoDB. I’ve explored container deployment methodologies and used orchestration to deploy test and integration environments to host the service and dependencies.

Lately I’ve been spending time in Next.js and React writing some web frontends and using React server components to provide the backend. I’ll be diving deeper into these topics and sharing some template projects I’m building as I continue to post on this site. I hope you find them interesting and I’d love your feedback, particularly if you have expertise in these technology stacks.

While I’m not completely closing off the possibility of full-time employment in either engineering or management roles, I’m more interested in helping people deliver focused projects with a shorter term scope, bringing my engineering, leadership, and communication skills to freelance and contract opportunities. If you are aware of anyone who could benefit from partnering with me, I’d be grateful for your referrals.

Thanks, and be well!