Blog

About Me

My website doesn't have an about me section. For good reason: this website has existed for 10 years, has many iterations and I'm constantly learning.

I’m on the Integral engineering team. I'm an individual contributor contributing to the core product. I decided to join Integral because bookkeeping/accounting/financial reporting is a crucial part to any business. I can't say I'm a big crypto advocate, but I see value add of USDC because of the lack of innovation and high cost in the banking sector. Ex. Wire transfer vs sending USDC. As the world shifts to be more globalized, evaluating items in a single currency will be more normal. Ex. Pay Software Engineer in any country in USD.

The second reason was the problems they were facing. I had just solved a number of problems at Convictional. Made a number of mistakes, had some wins and even more learning. I saw it as an opportunity to reapply those learnings and try again. I joined Integral as employee seventeen.

I believe I'm making progress and writing here is to share those learnings as l do them again.

Previously I had worked at Convictional. I had joined as employee seven and as an individual contributor. I led a number of projects to help contributing to finding product market fit. Projects like Frontend rewrite to React, EDI, Actions, Alerts, optimizing the onboarding experience, lots of support and supporting the product. Most those projects mean nothing to most unless your familiar with the product.

As the company continued to grow, I became an Engineering Manager. I made this decision to continue to grow past just an Individual Contributor. High functioning teams are really powerful, and great managers are rare. I believed I could be a good manager by balancing: what I expected from my past managers, context on the culture, company and product, and business context. I believe I threaded this needle well. I was responsible for recruiting, hiring, firing and coaching these team members. I developed a lot of new skills. Ex. Recruiting - cold outreach, and convincing someone to leave their job to work for me.

Eventually I moved into the Head of Engineering. I have a nack of balancing business outcomes, product deliverable and Engineer’s career goals. I had 1 Engineering manage report into me and a high number reports rolled up to me. I was in this role the shortest period, but led through Black Friday / Cyber Monday, holidays, and stabilized the engineer team (layoffs unrelated to my team). I implemented a number for processes that helped make outcomes more concrete (implemented Shape Up).

Before Convictional, I worked at Capital One in the Software Studio. This wasn't an early startup, but a big org. I picked up a lot good skills, developed a lot of technical skills working with ETL jobs and AWS every day. I worked for a great manager that was given all the best projects and therefore my work was extremely interesting and at a large scale.

I'll stop there with my work history. The rest I was fairly junior or coops.

I spend a lot of time building products, reading and learning. I'm a naturally curious person and enjoy writing to share the outcomes of that exploring.

Topics I tend to explore:

Product building - I'm often hacking on projects.
Golang - I do most coding outside of work in Go.
New startup services - I enjoy trying to new products for my side projects.
Retail space - with Convictional I went really deep into this space. I must say I think about it constantly.
Quality Investing - compounding is an amazing idea. And I like a lot of the lessons from value investors.