Who's this guy?

Hi! I'm Jon (Jonathan, Jonny, Jon, whatever). I am currently a software engineer at Google in the San Francisco bay area. I am a motivated individual with far too many interests, but have particular passions for self-education, technology, and fitness.

I love dealing with complex systems, distributed or otherwise. I find it fascinating to work through source code to discover the tricks and patterns used to achieve the desired goal. Learning about how systems overcome obstacles and how said obstacles shape the system architecture is something I will happily devote my days to. I have an admiration for clever algorithms and data structures that challenge my ways of thinking, and hope to author some of my own research one day.

Below is my recent work history, for those who care to peruse.

Oracle - Senior Software Engineer

Until recently I worked for Oracle on their newly released infrastructure cloud. I had been a part of this org since most of the `git init`s took place, and was a member of the load balancing team throughout my time there. The load balancing service handles the load balancing (and availability) of all internal services, and is also offered as a public-facing, highly available, reliable load balancing solution for our external customers. In the time that I was on this team, I worked on every part of both the internal and external service stacks. I worked on the public and private APIs, data object modeling, service deployments and tooling, workflow creation and scheduling, and was the team lead for multiple services within the org. As the primary engineer working on multiple customer facing services I got the opportunity to work closely with other team (and sub-team) leads to convey needs or concerns, provide an understanding of our control plane and data plane architecture when needed, and supply fixes or recommendations to their projects when bugs were found or enhancements were necessary.

We were a medium sized group that was growing quickly; however, because of our initial lack of numbers my team and I have also acted as SREs for our services. This necessity turned into another project that I initiated, which was an independent fleet of agents to automatically detect, report, and correct inconsistencies in our internal/external deployments and load balancer states.

Nebula - Software Engineer

At Nebula we were tasked with building a massively scalable, next generation Openstack deployment solution (hardware device). I was individually charged with the development of a distributed scheduler that ran on the device and handled rapid simultaneous deployments of systems. I also maintained an autonomous inventory management system for private datacenter control and operation. My direct team was a small design- and theory-focused engineering team that put emphasis on good architectural practices and code correctness. One of my favorite parts of the job was stepping back with this group and analysing what we had written, planning what to write, or just having a tech talk reviewing research papers. In the course of business I had many other responsibilities like conducting performance tests or working with a field debugging team at customer locations. Working here gave me the privilege to work alongside truly talented leaders in various computational fields including security, cloud computing, object storage, and architecture.

App Academy - Web Developer

Before App Academy I was purely self taught. I had a lot of skills at this point, but needed to round off my rough edges and learn the lay of the land. App Academy was an experience that I would recommend to anyone looking to get career ready with their coding abilities. The program was an immersive full stack web development course requiring the writing of daily/weekly web apps as demos, fun, or for potential customers' short term project needs. The curriculum involved daily experiments and exercises with new frameworks, technologies, and user experience options (typically followed by homework). During this time, I held myself to a rigorous schedule involving 60+ hours a week of self/co-educating and coding practice.

More Stuff

This section is for me. Think of this as an unfinished annoyance that I am including purely to make myself more inclined to write blog posts and showcase my projects more often. I tend to want to spend more time on my actual job than on showcasing myself as an individual, but knowing that I have a public facing, unfinished section on my profile page will be a good motivator :) I was about to drop a permanent construction worker gif here for old times sake, but then thought… maybe not everyone shares my 90s nostalgia.

tl;dr this is the section where things might eventually exist, but is currently serving as a motivator.