Cloud Solutions Architect at Insight. I design and build cloud-based distributed systems for clients. After hours, I write database internals.
A graph is only as good as the storage engine beneath it, and those are hard — so I'm building the pieces in the open, one at a time: a SQL parser for the Code Crafters SQLite challenge, data pages, a B-tree, a buffer pool, and a write-ahead log.
I'm still working out how transactions coordinate the buffer pool and the write-ahead log. If you can explain it cleanly, open an issue.
Graphs run through access control, too. kingo is my clone-in-progress of Google's Zanzibar — a graph problem and a little-language problem at once: the relation tuples form the graph you traverse, and the userset rewrite rules are a small expression language.
I wrote my first domain-specific language in 1996, for an electric utility billing system. A second followed in 1998, for server-side dynamic HTML rendering. A third in 2008: a query language for a custom GIS database with temporal-spatial sharding. Lately I've been rebuilding the craft from the ground up — a lexer and a recursive-descent interpreter.
I've programmed professionally in FORTRAN, C, C++, Delphi, C#, BASIC, VB.Net, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Perl, LISP, and a few obscurities like Object PAL. Pressed for a favorite, I'd name C# and C. I'm slowly catching up on functional programming, because monads make me happy.
pool is an object pool for dotnet; plumber is a request-response middleware pipeline built for AWS Lambda, with a Serilog extension to match. I also keep DynamoDbLite, a DynamoDB emulator on SQLite, in active development. All three run in real-world projects.
Hillsborough County's gifted program introduced me to computer programming and lambda calculus when I was nine. That was 1978. After high school I served in the US Army as a crew chief on AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters. These days I fly small planes, hold an airframe mechanic's certificate, and write a flight controller for the Tello drone for fun.
When the desert lost its charm, I came home to Florida, shook the rust off my brain, and joined the engineering co-op at Tampa Electric in 1993. Its sister company TeCom hired me as a software engineer in 1995. Since then — early internet startups, IoT and GIS shops, machine-vision startups, and several fintechs — I've built a few systems at real scale: a GPS tracking platform running 1.3 trillion geofence evaluations a day, an asset tracker watching 650,000 devices, and a verifications pipeline that grew 100x. For 18 years I ran my own software consulting firm.
Open an issue on this repo, or find me on LinkedIn. Ask me about anything.
Fun fact: my first computer was a room I never saw. I reached it through a Teletype Model 37 that printed every screen refresh in full — bang, shake, rumble, pop, beep — while we played Star Trek. It shook the whole room. Most amazing thing I'd ever seen. Decades later I rebuilt that game in C#.