Polyglot, problem solver and remote-worker, and engineering leader. I enjoy solving problems according to their technical specifications, ecosystem support, business longevity1.
I've been the CTO of a 50 person startup, a Sr. Director of Engineering, led a deeply technical platform group ~25 software engineers and ~3 managers and most recently built out our Database Platform Team as the Tech Lead Manager and retired to being the Architecture Lead for Platform.
I'm deeply interested in results and less interested in the exact tools/technology we use.
- The Perfect Proxy: Technical Specification (5 months ago)
- The Perfect Proxy: The Power of Limits (6 months ago)
- TiDB Resource Controls: 2 years into Best Practices (8 months ago)
- Field Reference Paths as Transactional Extensions (8 months ago)
- Surviving Database Migrations: Ambitious and a little crazy (8 months ago)
- Incremental Technical Automation (2 years ago)
- 2024: The Rise of S3-Backed OLTP Databases (2 years ago)
- Database Best Practices (2 years ago)
- 2024 State of the Union (2 years ago)
- zph/hermit-packages - hermit package declarations (1 day ago)
- zph/signalk-vhf-watch - Experimental receive-only marine VHF monitor with private live listening and rolling replay for Signal K (1 month ago)
- zph/signalk-pager - Reliable Pushover paging and Telegram incident acknowledgements for Signal K (1 month ago)
- zph/signalk-vhf-watch - Experimental receive-only marine VHF monitor with private live listening and rolling replay for Signal K
- zph/signalk-pager - Reliable Pushover paging and Telegram incident acknowledgements for Signal K
- zph/signalk-constants - Publish user-configured constant values to Signal K
- Founding my own startup
- Databases at scale
- Log Architecture and Data pipelines [eg]
- High throughput distributed & fault tolerant systems
- Rapid growth and learning
- While delivering high business impact
- That's sustainable and low maintenance
- Striking the right balance of speed and precision (depending on circumstance)
- Enjoying the work I do and the people I work with
- Fintech
- Small/medium startups
- High traffic websites
- Media companies
- Platform
- Online Storage
- Infrastructure
- Developer Efficiency
🏫 Technologies I want to spend more time with professionally and personally (ORDER BY interest DESC):
- NewSQL, NoSQL, ClassicSQL
- TiDB
- FoundationDB
- Postgresql
- MySQL
- MongoDB2 tooling, operations and cluster management
- GRPC & Protobufs (they're the future 😍 and the past 🤔)
- Golang (fast, predictable, dull and small syntax surface area 🐿️))
- Rust
or Haskell(to improve my craft of software engineering)3 - Elixir (in the right niche circumstances and for the pragmatism of OTP 🔮)4
I enjoy programming, pairing (1-1), remote teams, Open Source Software, databases, commandline tools, FP and some other important buzzwords.
I'm very fortunate to be happily employed with a few standing offers but if you want to offer me the chance to work on challenging things with kind folks, I'm happy to chat. To set realistic expectations5, it's unlikely I'll be drawn away from my current team because they're wonderful folks <3.
- zph/terraform-provider-mongodb (v0.5.6, 1 week ago) - MongoDB Terraform Provider
- LaunchPlatform/beanhub-import (1.4.1, 4 months ago) - Beanhub-import is a simple, declarative, smart, and easy-to-use library for importing extracted transactions from beanhub-extract. It generates Beancount transactions based on predefined rules.
- zph/runbook (1.0.0, 8 months ago) - 📖 CLI for dynamic runbooks: a structured and auditable approach to creating and executing operational procedures, bridging the gap between simple shell scripts and more complex tooling 💻
- Integrate supplemental Orca AIS, timestamps, routes, and metrics on zph/signalk-orca-core (2 months ago)
- Update VERSION to 3.0.62016 on zph/terraform-provider-mysql (3 months ago)
- Read back TiDB max_user_connections via runtime column probe on zph/terraform-provider-mysql (3 months ago)
- jira-cli (2 years ago)
- Deno wrapper for pagerduty-cli (3 years ago)
- EBS disk warming script using fio (3 years ago)
- Gathin23/cleanyourtv - Debloat any Android or Google TV over Wi-Fi and get an Apple TV-style home. (1 week ago)
- codykociemba/NoLongerEvil-Thermostat - Breathe fresh life into your bricked Nest, now with 100% less evil! (2 weeks ago)
- dsmurrell/onkey - Learn to sing the songs you love. A free, open-source singing trainer for Mac that listens to the music you play. (2 weeks ago)
- Blog: https://blog.xargs.io
- Github: https://github.com/zph
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zph/
-ZPH [email protected]
To send secure messages, use my public keys on github combined with age
Footnotes
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Low excitement, high productivity and reliable/performant systems ↩
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MongoDB and I have a complicated relationship. It helped successfully launch and scale three startups of mine and was a poor choice for datastore in 2 of 3. I've come to appreciate deeply what it accomplished in the 1 of 3 where it was the most correct choice available and also look forward to evolving onto a new platform that can learn from the architectural mistakes of MongoDB. Ironically, by knowing it deeply and the alternatives, I've become hawkish defender of Mongo when people throw around technically barbs about this datastore. It's as if the trauma I've experienced have bonded me to it like Gollum and The Ring. ↩
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Rust is a language that can still help me grow as a software engineer and one I'd enjoy a sincere practical reason to become proficient with. ↩
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At this point I'd be disinclined to choose Elixir unless the focus was realtime messaging and we were gaining key advantages from OTP. ↩
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If I look at all offers/outreach, I've accepted around 1 in 500 ↩