About
Hi, I'm David.
The work
I'm a senior backend engineer in Portland, Oregon. My specialty is the JVM (Kotlin and Java), but I write most of my shell scripts in Python, and I often build frontends in TypeScript for side projects.
I'm also very comfortable with infrastructure work. I use Ansible to provision my personal machines, and Terraform for infrastructure, both at work and at home. I've deployed Kubernetes services for a decade and run my own cluster. I'm most familiar with AWS — passed the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam in 2020 — but have side projects that run on Google Cloud and Cloudflare.
I have 13+ years in the field. I started my career in QA, doing automated testing. That origin shapes how I work — quality is the thing, and tests come before implementation.
In 2017 I pivoted into the backend JVM world, building microservices with REST APIs. I learned Kotlin on my own, loved it, and built consensus to start using it. More recently, I've designed and implemented event-based (Kafka) architectures, data pipelines, and agentic orchestration.
The rest
Outside of work I'm a photographer, trail runner, traveler, and backpacker. I read a lot — mostly nonfiction and biographies — and I'm a longtime listener of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast.
How I think
I tend to be an early adopter, but with a healthy dose of skepticism. I draw a lot of my views on tech and society from people like Cal Newport, Steven Johnson, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.