About Me

Passions

In my early 20's I just wanted to write code, create, and solve problems. Management and leading others was not on my mind. Working in a consultancy in my late 20's I began to work with customers and do more than the code. From my 30's on (the last 10+ years) I transitioned to full manager with coding being my after-work interest. I realized that coding was my way to solve problems and as a manager I could solve a bigger and many more problems. There was only so much code I could personally write in a day.

I have a passion for personal growth, an interest in how people think, and a reflex to optimize. That has translated in recent years to a love of identifying potential in people and accelerating growth. As a manager of managers my building blocks are people, teams, and leaders. It has been exciting to know how to move people into the position that helps them grow and deliver successfully.

This leadership role has expaned what it is to solve problems. Building roadmaps, working with product on direction, and ensuring that delivery strategies are well structured are all part of leading a team to success.

Skills

I'll scratch the surface. I lead with years of experience around Agile methodologies, scrum practices, and the occasional Gantt chart to help me map out budgets and depedencies. I've used tools like Trello, Pivotal Tracker and Jira for years as part of planning work with teams, and many forms of wikil ike Confluence to build story around my teams and work. As a manager I've been writing a lot less code over the years but before those days I had worked in languaeges like HTML/CSS, JS, ASP, PHP, Ruby, Java/JSP. I have helped people with old languages like basic Fortran. I have tinkered with OCaml. I've built experiments using Gremlin and graph databases. I also used a wide range of databases like Postgres, Flavours of SQL (MySQL, SQL Server, SQlite) Neo4j. I've used environments like Node and frameworks like Rails. Old-school JS libraries like JQuery/Backbone/Prototype/Dojo and I'm ramping up on more modern ones like React, Astro, and Tailwinds. I'm getting to the point where I can mostly read just about anything althoug recently looking into the Uiua language, that's a challenge.

Experiences

Prime Gaming (Amazon Seattle)

Prime Gaming has been a story of reinvention. When I joined the team, there had been a lot of management challenges and a large leadership change. I started leading one team and within months was leader three and helping design the org. Reshaping the teams, tech ownership, clean up tech-debt, improve the product performance, and generally overhaul.

Prime Gaming

Amazon's team that boost the Prime benefit by giving away games and game content.

Healthtech (Amazon Seattle)

This org was young and approaching the launch of the first Amazon owned health wearable. It was an experiment to produce a cheaper, screen-less, high precision health tracker. I joined 6 months before launch at a time when there were many challenges. I created a Sleep and Activity team, used a group of frontend engineers to rebuild the react native app functions, rebuilt the internals of a device to cloud data pipeline, and led my engineers as they rebuilt the way health data was retrieved and computed. I also worked directly with firmware and algorithm providers on improving accuracy to the point where we successfully launched.

Halo Health Tracking Band

Amazon's first health tracking wearable

Alexa (Amazon Seattle)

This org is well known and a beast of teams all trying to move fast. I owned a team focussing on device discovery and my APIs were used by partners like Philips Hue along with internal Echo and Amazon Smart devices reporting back for discovery. This all helped Alexa interface with physical devices. In this org with my team I created a new sequence of authentication and access permission exchanges that allowed Amazon's first, 3rd party, zero-touch discovery process known as Frustration Free Setup. We launched with TP-Link and my name is on the patent.

Alexa Zero Touch Setup

A version of wifi based onboarding and credential sharing that allowed a TP-Link smart plug to be setup with no action required by the user

Prime Video (Amazon Seattle)

I spent 3+ years in this org and it taught me a lot. I built multiple teams. I built up my original team that integrated the metadata catalog across all other teams. This was a great chance to see how the many teams in Prime Video work. I built up a team to help ingest and process live TV schedules. We found the quality was poor and our systems raised the quality as much as allowed users to see the live channels schedules. I built up a team to integrate our catalog with others using large exports. This powered Samsung TVs and Apple allowing their universal search. I also led work on a unification of our global catalog and our expansion beyond Amazon's traditional marketplaces. Our catalog needed to be ready early to power digital subscription only marketplaces and my team shaped our content for all those teams to consume. I learned a lot about Delivering Results (a key leadership principle in Amazon) with these teams.

Thursday Night Football

Amazon Starts Streaming Live Football on its existing TVOD/Channels platform.

Prime Video Global Launch

Expanding beyond the borders of existing Amazon marketplaces buy reforming a catalog of millions of existing titles with a catalog team and teams across Amazon and globe.

3rd Party Search Integration

Building a team around exporting large feeds of the Amazon Video Catalog to enable global search on other platforms

Obama’s State of the Union

Working across Amazon Video's teams to ensure that our first ever live streaming of a presidental state of the union would work.

Older Experiences

The Frontier Group (Australia)

This was a small consultancy made up from a group of developers trying to build out websites, make web and mobile apps, and build. We had a team of less than 25 (designers and managers included) always building multiple concurrent projects. We used tech like Ruby on Rails and in this company I got to act in sales, marketing, product manager, and tech lead roles while contributing code where needed. This was an intense time. I was senior but not fully aware of the companies financials. I later understood the company was hit buy a critical partner going bankrupt causing unrecoverable losses and eventually closing it down after I had moved on. I learned a lot here and it was team of great people.

The Department of Minerals and Energy

I spent 7 years here. I transitioned into a team helping to convert their years of paper based records, to helping with their content management system, and finally landing on a development team building out the application as an engineer. I'm 90% sure I overcomplicated things and I've since learned a lot about logical and maintainable code (another critical hiring concern of Amazon). I was building a user interface that did more than other software at the time for managing the legal aspects of leasing land for mining. I learned about geospatial aspects, data management, and working with users. I also got to see some great managers trying to create momentum challenged by the slow pace of a government organization.