I’m a builder and technical leader with a long career at the intersection of databases, streaming data, and developer infrastructure.

Currently I’m Head of Streaming Products at MongoDB, focused on Atlas Stream Processing, streaming data pipelines at scale.

Background

I co-founded Eventador.io, an enterprise streaming platform built on Apache Kafka and Flink. Eventador was acquired by Cloudera in 2020, where I served as Principal Architect for Streaming Analytics.

Before that I co-founded ObjectRocket, a managed MongoDB hosting service acquired by Rackspace in 2012. At Rackspace I served as Chief Technologist for Data.

Earlier I worked at PayPal in 2001, helping scale their infrastructure through the eBay acquisition and the rapid growth that followed. Before that I scaled Hi5’s infrastructure from a handful of servers to dozens handling multi-terabyte workloads, a crash course in database engineering under pressure.

Writing

Before blogging existed, technical knowledge traveled through user group newsletters. In 2002 I had my first article published in the NoCOUG Journal, the quarterly publication of the Northern California Oracle Users Group, on using OS snapshots for Oracle database backups.

Open Source

I’m an early MongoDB adopter (former Mongo Master) and have contributed tooling to both the MongoDB and PostgreSQL communities, including mongostat and pgstat2. I hold an Oracle Certified Professional certification (v8, for the archaeologists).

Interests

Databases, streaming architectures, AI agents, and the craft of shipping software. I write about what I’m building and learning.

You can also find me on GitHub and LinkedIn.

Opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer.