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. Iâve seen every stage of scale: from startup, to powering a significant chunk of the worldâs 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:
- 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
- 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
- Launch. Youâre 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
- Review. Youâre about to make a big infrastructure decision, I go through and review it with you and the team in detail. 1-2 days
- 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 whoâs done it before.
Next step is to email simon@webscale.ca
and tell
me which problems youâre dealing with, and weâll set up an intro call.
Examples
- 2023
- Prototype for Replicate: faster cold boots for large ML models
- Audit for Typefully: focus on Timescale scalability, best-practises, and observability.
- 2022
- Review for Whimsical
- Launch for Readwise: Reader launch, especially database and job tuning
- Prototype for Readwise: Ghostreader, AI-reading assistant
- Prototype for Datafold: data-diff, fast diff between two databases
- Review for Rutter: Database migration woes
- Prototype for Causal: Scaling their spreadsheet engine from millions to billions of cells
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.