$ cd ~/story
Still short. The whole thing is one idea applied to bigger and bigger systems: make the things people depend on worthy of it.
California kid goes east. At Brown I studied applied mathematics and computer science — math for knowing systems have structure, CS for knowing you can build one. I have never needed a third subject.
Amazon and Salesforce were the education you can’t buy: systems where failure meant a pager at 3 a.m. and a promise broken to millions of people at once. I learned to keep big things up — and noticed that the best engineers don’t wait for failure. They go looking for it first.
So in 2016 I co-founded Gremlin and, as CTO, talked the Fortune 500 into deliberately attacking their own software. It sounded like a prank and worked like a science, and it became a discipline called chaos engineering. Six years of banks, airlines, and stores getting harder to break — and a crash course in the other kind of reliability: teams, trust, and staying calm in an incident.
After Gremlin I rested, ran, cooked — then aimed the same craft at the biggest system there is. At QuitCarbon and Zero Homes I worked on getting ordinary homes off fossil fuels, because a home is a system too, and so is the climate it sits in.
Reliably Yours is my consultancy — the name is the ethos and the signature at once. I’ve carried the pager, founded the company, made the payroll. Been there before. Happy to help.
$ cd ../writing