👤 Who am I?

I'm Drew! I'm a software engineer. I love building great products and creating high-performing teams.

I have 9 years of experience across 4 companies. I have experience with rapid growth, surviving layoffs, rewrites, greenfield development, and legacy surgery.

Over time, my experience and interest has trended toward early-stage startups because I thrive in cross-functional & lean environments.

My current tech stack includes React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Flask, Postgres, and my focus lately has been on the front end. Please note: I'd be happy to join a team that includes none of these things in their tech stack; I care about building great products much more than I care about using specific tools.

Find me on LinkedIn here. Download my resumé.

🏋🏼‍♂️ What are my strengths?

Building intuitive web applications in complex domains

I am a product engineer, first and foremost. I am motivated by putting powerful tools in the hands of people who need to solve difficult problems. I’ve led fullstack development across a number of frameworks & domains.

I am also a huge nerd about software development practices--testing and type programming especially, since these things help teams build stuff faster & safer.

I balance these two passions by looking at everything through a Lean lens. If you wanted to know my philosophy on building software, Lean UX best describes my views, and I highly recommend it! But also, we could do a zoom call =)

Written communication

I love writing, and I think it's an important practice for engineers! This podcast episode from First Round Review really resonates with me in how writing is discussed as both an end and a means. To paraphrase Brie Wolfson, “the act of writing about something crafts the way you think about it”.

I use writing to effect org-wide changes on things like code review norms, delivery forecasting, testing best practices, architecture changes, ux best practices. The point is never to tell anyone what to do, but rather to make our shared processes & norms easier to engage with and get alignment on (and change!).

Creating & driving adoption of best practices

At GX, I've put consistent effort into ensuring dev feedback loops are fast and painless, and it shows! Over the last year, the time it takes to run our tests has decreased by 90% while the number of tests has doubled.

Without even running the tests, the type programming & code generation practices that I've led ensure that you'll know how API changes affect our application, and how to deal with them.

I revamped our agile process to increase throughput and decrease bugs by carefully dismantling the SAFe process I inherited and empowering engineers to own and understand the value of their work. You can read my (unpublished) blog post about this here. (I kinda wish I had measured the throughput & defect impacts, but I had more valuable things to do with my time than fool with Jira metrics).

Mentorship

You can read my blog post on mentorship, but suffice it to say this is something I care deeply about and have put significant effort into getting good at, to significant success! I've helped multiple engineers at GX get senior promotions.

🔍 What am I looking for?

• An IC role, approximately a staff engineer, though the specific title is not important to me.
• I want to build a product that solves difficult, meaningful problems for users. I want to make users say “thank god we have <product name here>”
• I want to work cross-functionally with folks who are really good at their jobs & learn from them.
• I'm looking for a product culture that is compatible with lean ways of working & experiment-driven product development. I'm not talking A/B tests per se, but I've found that an evidence-based worldview is critical to the success of product teams.
• Adoption of (or just alignment on; we live in an imperfect world) best practices that empower teams to move fast: CI/CD, trunk-based development, lightweight planning processes.

🤝 Signs we'd be a good fit

These don't have to be perfect matches, but I'm looking for them as “good signal”.

• There'd be at most 2 people in the hierarchy between me and the C-suite.
• You are building an inclusive and equitable culture.
• You encourage engineers to take risks and also hold them accountable for delivering value.
• You care about working “out loud” (work visibility is vital to healthy remote cultures) and recognizing glue work.
• You expect people to flex across roles and departments to work together and get stuff done.

📏 Constraints

• I work remotely in the Eastern Time Zone.
• I'm currently employed, but interested in interviewing for the right opportunity.