Resume

Defense Unicorns was founded in 2021 with the mission of improving software delivery in secure and air-gapped environments in the Department of Defense with our open source products, services, and thought leadership. In that time we have grown from 6 to over 100 platform engineers.

• In partnership with the Linux Foundation, created content and recorded training for a free 'Intro to DevSecOps for Management' course to help create a common context on mission goals.
• Responsible for for evaluating and advising our customers, Department of Defense software programs, on improvements needed to meet their goals for continuous delivery in secure environments.
• Worked across internal product teams to develop common solutions for development practices, reusable automation, improved test design, and external documentation to standardize the developer experience and reduce the overhead of onboarding and product development.
• Defined our long term strategy for external communications to highlight our open source prodcut offerings, our thought leadership, and the improvements they provide.

Contracted to USAF's Platform One to help Platform One's leadership with the issues they were experiencing with rapidly scaling their delivery platform service.

• Advised Platform One military and civilian leadership on technical, process, and organizational improvements needed to scale their platform to the needs of the Department of Defense.
• Designed and developed an open source delivery metrics solution that provides flow metrics, delivery metrics, and related self-service training fr any organization using Platform One.
• Collaborated with the DoD Office of the CIO, USAF Office of the CSO, and other service offices to develop a strategy and method for collecting relevant metrics from all software factories for reporting to Congress.
• Provided experiential feedback on improvements needed to meet their platform product goals for continuous delivery of secure systems to top secret environments.

Founded Walmart's DevOps Dojo as a delivery platform service to help product teams learn the teamwork and development practices needed for continuous delivery. This was part of an enterprise strategy to use CD to elevate engineering excellence and business delivery across Walmart Global Tech.

• Designed a repeatable, measurable process to help teams move to a continuous integration workflow in six-week engagements and give them the knowledge to move to daily prodcution delivery.
• Created an internal knowledge base of playbooks to help solve common problems teams faced with CD to help teams self-improve rather than wait on a Dojo engagement. These were later open-sourced to help the broader industry.
• Developed and implemented a strategy for training and certifying senior engineers in the Dojo's techniques to horizontally scale improvement across 1800+ development teams.
• Designed and developed a tool to use team delivery metrics to suggest areas of improvement and to guide teams to the appropriate playbooks.
• Collaborated with executives across the enterprise to help establish dedicated improvement strategies in their verticals.
• Led an enterprise initiative to establish a standard glossary of testing patterns with recommended approaches to improve testing practices.
• Led an enterprise initiative to establish recommendations for delivery metrics to help leadership understand how to use and avoid misuse of metrics focused on improving our delivery goals.
• Provided feedback from the Dojo to other developer platform product leads to inform platform improvements.
• Worked with corporate training to develop and execute a 5-day training class on an intro to Continuos Delivery.
• Worked with other Fortune 100 companies to form the Enterprise Dojo Consortium to share good practices for helping each other's teams improve delivery.

Responsible for leading product development for the global collection, aggregation, visualization, and gamification of delivery metrics for the enterprise.

• Worked with product teams to refine our usage of gamified delivery metrics to encourage team behaviors for trunk-based development, continuous integration, and continuous delivery while avoiding the creation of perverse incentives.
• Led the design of metrics aggregation to show summaries for SVP and CTO consumption to track our global delivery improvement goals.

Member of the Logistics team responsible for designing and implementing the changes required to enable over 400 Logistics developers to move from quarterly to daily production delivery.

• Collaborated with the other senior engineers to leverage Domain Driven Design and Conway's Law to design the 'to be' product teams needed to decouple the legacy system and allow each team to deliver continuously independently from each other.
• Joined the Logistics Receiving team to pilot continuous delivery practices for the area so we could share the lessons learned to help accelerate other teams. These methods were then used to help other teams inside and outside of Logistics. These changes improved the team's delivery cadence from one delivery per quarter to as many as 10 deliveries per day with development to prodcution lead times of less than one day.

Responsible for integrating over 400 feature branches for the quarterly release of Walmart's global warehouse management system with the mandate to develop area source management processes that would make the team unnecessary.

• Automated the branching and build configurations process with SVN and Anthill Pro for over 800 applications. This reduced the effort to create a feature branch of the system from 4 days to 90 minutes and made the effort self-service rather than a support request.
• Changed the role of the team from code integration to creating the ability for teams to integrate their own code.
• Introduced the concepts of continuous integration and trunk based development. This allowed the area to reduce the number of long-lived branches from several hundred to 3.

One of four leads responsible for working with several hundred contractors to merge four different warehouse management systems into a single Global Logistics System.

• Helped design an implement the changes required to enable eCommerce order filling from non-dedicated distribution centers.
• As part of an effort to combine four legacy warehouse management systems into one, I was responsible for creating development standards, reviewing and approving designs, mapping data models to a common model, and code review for over 300 contract developers.
• Implemented voice order filling for our UK division. This enabled faster, more accurate order filling and the decommissioning of label-based order filling for 30+ distribution centers.
• Implemented application logging and source formatting solutions for the system. This enabled faster issue resolution, application performance monitoring, and reduced code complexity.
• Implemented automated version leveling to ensure 30+ international distribution centers were running the same versions of over 700 applications.

Responsible for working closely with our customers to gather business requirements, implement changes, and provide operational support for our EXE's warehouse management system.

Responsible for selecting content for the DevOps and Business Agility tracks

Community project to establish a set of minimum problems to solve that define continuous delivery in every delivery context.

• Provide feedback on State of Value Stream Management surveys.
• Author of several blog posts on value stream improvement.

Community project to share good practices developed in the enterprise dojos

• Open sourced Walmart Dojo playbooks to help the community.