small army of nerds

Work

Client stories

Bruce Power: inspection software, 2011–2017

The situation: Bruce Power inspects the fuel channels in its reactors during planned outages, using a legacy inspection software suite of more than 500,000 lines. Every hour an inspection runs over is an hour a reactor isn't generating power.

What I did: I built a small team of developers, trained them in the suite, and gave Bruce Power on-site support around the clock during inspections. At the same time we rebuilt the software, shipping a series of releases on time and under budget.

The result: our upgrades were a big part of cutting inspection times by about half, much of it by eliminating crashes, lost data and rework. That was worth more than $10 million a year in power generation revenue.

NPX: live plant data and a cloud rebuild, 2019–2021

NPX is a contractor to Bruce Power, and I worked on two Bruce Power projects as their subcontractor.

Year one, live plant data: an experiment in showing live, plant-internal data as time-series dashboards. I spent the year building a Kafka and Druid back end on GCP with Terraform, and a charting dashboard on top of it. It was working on historic datasets when the project was stopped.

Then, a cloud rebuild: next, a rebuild of a legacy desktop application for job tracking and engineering readiness reports, which had reached end of life. The new version was to run in Bruce Power's Azure cloud, on a very tight schedule. I built the infrastructure (containerized servers on Azure with SQL Server), secure test environments that deployed continuously from CI, the React and Express front end for entering jobs and status, the management and reporting screens, and part of the pipeline for bringing in historic data. When I moved on, all of that was in place and the historic data import was underway.

Selected roles

Goosechase: 2021–now

I joined as a staff engineer to lead a platform rebuild, replacing a legacy Django monolith with TypeScript services on Kubernetes in AWS. As head of engineering I hired and mentored the team and saw the rebuild through. Today I'm the infrastructure and security engineer, responsible for observability, security awareness, AppSec coaching, monitoring and incident response.

Coinsquare: 2018–2019

As technical lead, I led the DevOps team, moving deployments to containerized CI/CD on GCP and Kubernetes, and droving security and operational change across engineering.

Career summary