I worked for 8 years as a Principal Engineer of Infrastructure at Shopify, chasing bottlenecks in every layer of the stack from 100s of RPS to ~1M. I’ve seen every stage of scale: from startup, to powering a significant chunk of the world’s commerce.

Today, I consult with companies to scale and evolve their web infrastructure.

I can deliver the most value if your problem fits one of the following:

  1. Audit. You bring me your pressing infrastructure woes, I start grepping your code-base and write a detailed report with actionable solutions that your engineers can run with. 1-3 weeks
  2. Prototype. You bring me a gnarly backend/infrastructure/database problem, I iterate from first principles to implement you a prototype your team can run with. Either alone, or with part of your team. 6-12 weeks
  3. Launch. You’re launching and worried your infrastructure will crack under the pressure. I do an audit and get on the ground to firm up the infra for launch, and give you a post-launch infra roadmap. 2-4 weeks
  4. Review. You’re about to make a big infrastructure decision, I go through and review it with you and the team in detail. 1-2 days
  5. Workshop. You want to level up your infrastructure team in system design. I do a workshop in-person or online on first-principles systems thinking and napkin math. 2 days

Make your infrastructure decisions with someone who’s done it before.

Next step is to email simon@webscale.ca and tell me which problems you’re dealing with, and we’ll set up an intro call.

Examples

I am comfortable at all layers of the stack, from Kernel to Rails to React. You can read more about what I spend time thinking about on the Napkin Math blog.