I am an operations and database engineer and sometimes engineering manager. Right now I am the CTO and cofounder of Honeycomb, where we build observability for distributed systems. (“Monitoring” doesn’t have to be a dirty word; give us a try.)

Until recently I was a production engineering manager at Facebook. I spent 3.5 years working on Parse (both pre and post-acquisition by FB). I also spent several years at Linden Lab, working on the infrastructure and databases that power Second Life. I am the co-author of “Database Reliability Engineering” by O’Reilly.

I was a classical piano performance major in college, but dropped out because it turns out I prefer not being dirt poor. I have been building systems and engineering teams ever since.

I love startups, chaos and hard scaling problems, and somehow I always end up in charge of the databases.