Industry Developer since 1996

Education

I graduated in 1996 after studying 1 year of Electrical Engineering and 3 years of Computer Engineering.

Early Career Highlights

My career began in technical support for a "real time" operating system company (QNX, later acquired by Blackberry) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. After a year of feeling like my skills as a developer weren't growing, I took a new job after doing a little networking. I knew a guy that knew a guy. I worked as a firmware developer for 3 more years at that company, plus one other company as a contractor, before moving to the United States.

In 2000, I got my first taste of startup life. Tiny company in the financial sector which lasted through the dot-com bust of 2001. Working at startups appealed to my nature of working quickly and feeling like my contributions truly mattered to the company. Through my career I've worked at, or freelanced for, well over a dozen startup businesses.

Many of my jobs only lasted 12-18 months...

My roles have included:
* tech support and pre-sales engineering
* consultancy/contracting: firmware development
* fintech sector: web development, devops, data center mgmt
* education sector: web development
* e-commerce: backend development, database optimization
* freelance consulting for nearly 3 years covering all kinds of interesting tech
* ad-tech sector: internal tooling, database work, real-time data-lake and custom map-reduce work
* gaming sector: DBA, DevOps, API development, microtransactions, API, community manager
* email/communications: lead web/API architect/engineer
* energy sector: management as Director of Engineering
* SaaS B2B: Developer Relations, Sales Engineering (plus a dozen other roles from office IT to Costco runs)
* education sector: Sr Instructor, teaching backend/API design
* PaaS: ~2 years at Postman in Developer Relations
* application hosting: ~9 months in Developer Relations at a small hosting/deployment company
* fintech sector and AI: 13 months at Square/Block
* PaaS: January 2026 onward, at Temporal Technologies in Developer Relations

Quite a journey...

Almost half of my career has been spent finding the best candidates for positions my company has open, through evaluating resumes, phone screens and conducting on-site interviews. I've also spent significant time refining on-site interview processes, and several years as a hiring manager or director of engineering and negotiating with candidates to find what's going to make everyone happy.

While a lot of my background comes from working in companies from 4 employees to 300 employees, I've also worked with much larger firms with employees in the thousands.