Hi there 👋

I occasionally blog about programming here.

I enjoy building information systems that just work, which can only be achieved by keeping IT as simple as IT can be. If you are into Clojure, Erlang/Elixir, Haskell, F#, OCaml, Ada, Prolog, Forth and APL or any other programming languages that jolts your brain to think, shock me via Twitter.

Note: I am NOT currently available for hire and do NOT respond to third party recruiters.

Work Experience

• 2016/02 - Present: Owner of Birkey Consulting

  • Building, Mentoring and Leading Engineering teams at Startups to design, develop and deliver great products.

• 2018/11 - Present: Director of Engineering TapClicks Inc

  • Led development on the Google Sheets product, enabling customers to see all of their cross-network marketing data in spreadsheets
  • Implemented high availability as well as improved monitoring and scalability for the Report product
  • Implemented automated PDF exports of scheduled reports
  • Tech Stack: Clojure, ClojureScript, Elixir/Phoenix, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and all things AWS.

• 2017/02 - 2018/09: Omnyway Inc

  • Senior Full Stack Clojure Engineer as an early member of core Engineering Team responsible for Core e-commerce platform and API development.
  • Tech Stack: Clojure/ClojureScript, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and all things AWS.

• 2012/08 - 2017/02: Runa Inc (Acquired by Staples Inc as Staples Labs)

  • Started as a Clojure Engineer. Later promoted to Engineering Lead, Engineering Manager and Director of Engineering. Responsible for SLA critical web services such as recommendation system, shipping prediction engine, etc.
  • Tech Stack: Clojure (with some Java where performance is critical), PostgreSQL/Redis, RabbitMQ (replaced by Kafka), Protobuf, and all things AWS.

• 2011/08 - 2012/08: The Climate Corporation

  • Java/Clojure Engineer as a member of Risk Management Team.
  • Tech Stack: Java (with Clojure sneaked in as jars), Thrift, and Spring/Hibernate.

• 2005/10 - 2011/08: Kyocera Document Solution USA

  • Started as a Software Engineer, then promoted to Team Lead. Responsible for developing Web Application that manages IoT printer fleets.
  • Tech Stack: Java, Spring/Hibernate, PostgreSQL, and OSGi.

Education

• Post Graduate Computer Science with Software Engineering focus at California State University East Bay - CSUEB.