I build products. Right now that means a real-time sports analytics app and internal tools that people actually want to use. I care about the engineering, but I care more about whether the thing works for the people using it.
Real-time NBA analytics app that tracks how "hot" players are during live games. I built the whole stack: SwiftUI frontend, Node backend, a scoring algorithm I designed with my co-founder who actually knows basketball. We're in TestFlight now, collecting feedback, and have a waitlist for public beta.
I own a UX improvement project for an internal vulnerability management platform. The tool works fine technically, but nobody wants to use it. I'm running user research with a product designer to figure out why and fix it.
Led architecture on bill tracking and report generation, which was the product. Sat in customer meetings, heard what was broken, built the fixes. Also did a React 18 migration that cut page load times by 40%, but the customer stuff was more interesting.
When I joined my current team, there was no incident response process. No alerting, no dashboards, nothing. I built the whole observability stack from scratch using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Loki, then worked with the on-call team to get it wired up. Now when something breaks, we know.
Before engineering, I taught AP Physics for 12 years in New Jersey, Kuwait, and China. At one school I inherited a physics program that was basically dead. I rewrote the curriculum, found $25K in funding, tripled enrollment, and got the department's first real gender balance. Then I hired someone to help cover all the new sections.
I didn't know it at the time, but that was product work. Figure out who you're building for, find out what's not working, fix it, measure whether it helped. The context changes but the job doesn't.
I'm interested in product engineering and engineering leadership roles. If that's what you're hiring for, let's talk.