Case studies
Four pieces of work, told honestly: what the situation was, what I actually did, what changed, and what I would do differently. Facts are kept coarse — public site, real employers.
Team recovery: delivering the projects that had already failed
Durbin Labs · Aug 2021 — Dec 2021Joining as an engineering manager amid missed deadlines and lost confidence — and leaving the team delivering beyond its own expectations.
Multiplemissed projects deliveredHands-onmanagement: architecture, code, production
The reporting platform that removed an engineering bottleneck
TestReach · 2022 — presentReplacing a third-party BI tool with customer self-service — and cutting template maintenance from half a day to about two minutes.
Days → self-servereport delivery — no engineering queue½ day → ~2 mintemplate maintenance
DataLake: a type-safe ingestion library as leverage
TestReach · 2022 — presentOne platform and one library that turned data ingestion from a recurring engineering project into a straightforward integration.
~2–2.5Mingestion events per day1 libraryinstead of N bespoke ingestion paths
Reliability: designing for failure at millions of events a day
TestReach · 2022 — presentRetries, exponential backoff, queue fairness and a webhook platform redesign — and a ~60% drop in processing failures.
~60%fewer event-processing failuresExponentialbackoff as the default retry curve