My Story
Hi, I’m Blayne, and I’ve been tinkering with technology nearly my entire life. I entered the programming world by accident when I was 14 as I sought to make my Amazon Associates referral site more dynamic. After I spent a few nights reading through the PHP manual, I looked back and realized…this is programming. I’ve been hooked ever since.
As I explored this discipline more deeply–from freelancing to designing to building ecommerce websites–through high school and college–I realized my true passion of building APIs and designing systems.
Experience
I am on the storage team which is responsible for part of the processing component of the ingestion pipeline that processes up to 1 billion events per second.
Go, DynamoDB, Kafka
My role as enterprise architect involved understanding the issues faced by engineering teams across the enterprise and to guide these teams to work efficiently. I accomplished this by sharing lessons learned as well as establishing standards for common processes such as the definition of a production-ready microservice.
Further, I designed architectures and formed execution plans for numerous key company initiatives including search infrastructure and SSO. I identified opportunities for reusable services within the company to save engineers (and the company) hundreds of hours of duplicate work.
Accomplishments:
- Created production-readiness microservice standards
- Created service initiative process
- Hardened and evangelized multiple microservices for reuse within the company
As the application architect for the Inventory+ platform, it was my duty to both decompose new system requirements as well as define the technical runway needed to support those requirements. I scoped these epics out and worked closely with the engineering teams to refine the requirements. On multiple occasions I built POCs to alleviate any uncertainty the teams might have.
I carried the platform on a journey to over a dozen microservices. I oversaw these services from ideation to release. To ensure highly reliable and scalable services, I employed the use of cloud-native architectures including serverless and auto-scaling infrastructures.
Another key arc throughout this role was a focus on DevOps, both from a technical capability as well as a people and process standpoint. Through my leadership our three-team product was able to sustain a deployment rate of over a dozen successful deployments per month.
Accomplishments:
- Established and refined architecture patterns and practices for new microservices
- Overhauled photo serving infrastructure, shaving 15% off the overall platform infrastructure cost
- Aligned seven teams by holding regular tech sessions to share and distill knowledge
AWS Lambda, Python, Flask, AWS ECS, Docker, Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, ElasticSearch, AWS Glue, Spark, AWS Redshift
During my time as principal software engineer, I was able to consistenly deliver projects on time with high quality results. Mentoring other engineers, on and off my teams, is something I enjoyed a lot as I really valued the mentoring I received earlier on in my career. I presented a number of tech talks that helped teams learn their way around the overly-complex application we all inherited.
I was selected to be on a number tiger teams to help accelerate various projects including the inception of our microservice’s tech stack, our monitoring stack, and data analysis for our top clients.
I designed and implemented our next-gen analytics platform, including data streams and data warehouse, to ensure we could deliver reliable and accurate insights to our customers quicker than we ever could before.
Accomplishments:
- Made key technical decisions that shaped the company’s microservice framework
- Implemented monitoring stack including metrics, alarms, and integration
- Researched, built, and maintained highly-scalable analytics platform
AWS Redshift, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Grafana, InfluxDB / Kapacitor, AWS ECS / Docker, Java, Spring Boot, Perl, MongoDB
I worked on the eCarList application as it was being acquired by a bigger company (DealerTrack) and was experiencing many growing pains. This meant the system was ripe for improvement, so I would take on a number of personal projects to improve the state of the codebase and stability of the system. One of the most notable projects I worked was the rework of the testing platform, which I stabilized (allowing it to run on personal machines) and optimized (from 10 mins down to 10s to execute).
Accomplishments:
- Overhauled product-wide testing platform
- Applied profiling techniques to identify inefficient code, resulting in roughly 2x speed improvement across core pieces of application
Perl, Linux, SSH, MySQL, MongoDB
Worked with a team to build third-party benefits administration application which controlled nearly $20m of FSA and HSA balances.
Accomplishments:
- Overhauled core data ingestion service to be 4x faster by using multi-threading
PHP, MySQL