Now · Principal Software Engineer

NicholasPage

Backend engineer, 17 years in. Freelance sites first, then an in-house logistics system, a small Hollywood startup where I ended up running the team, and eight years at a marketplace where I now own the consumer backend architecture. Go and Rails, mostly the parts that have to hold when huge crowds show up at once.

Tessryxthis page is running on it
This page is a JSON file plus a workflow that turns it into HTML, cached at the edge. There is no build step. Press X and the JSON shows up next to every card.This page is a JSON file plus a workflow that turns it into HTML, cached at the edge. There is no build step. Tap X-ray up top and every card shows the JSON behind it.

Principal Software Engineer at GOAT Group, where I review the architecture for the consumer backend. Tessryx is the side project: a platform where a JSON file and a workflow become a live site, which is how this page exists.

17+
years
86%
off the search bill
40k
people in one waiting room
100ms
page read, was a timeout
2018 to now8 yrs

GOAT Group

Principal Software Engineer

I came in as a senior backend engineer in 2018. Now I review the architecture for the consumer backend and do the design reviews for new services.

  1. Senior Backend Engineer2018 – 2020
  2. Staff Software Engineer2020 – 2022
  3. Senior Staff Software Engineer2022 – 2023
  4. Principal Software Engineer2023 – Now

01Replaced search

We were paying a hosted search vendor a lot of money. I moved us onto OpenSearch that we run ourselves, which cut the bill to about a seventh and halved median latency. The index takes a few hundred price changes a second without falling behind.

86%cheaper
50%faster
100s/sprice updates

02The drops system

A drop means everyone hits buy in the same minute. I designed the drops service from scratch: a waiting room in front, SQS and Redis queues behind it, payments handled asynchronously so a slow card doesn't hold the line. It has held at forty thousand people in the room.

40kpeak concurrent
SQS + Redisqueueing
#1install driver, still

03Bubble-up CMS

The CMS lived in the Rails monolith and the page that read from it would time out. I moved it into a Go service where each write raises an event that updates the denormalized DynamoDB view above it, and then the view above that. A page read is now one query, about 100ms, at 200 requests a second.

100msper read, was a timeout
200requests / sec
1 queryper page
2017 to 20181 yr 4 mos

The Tracking Board

Lead Software Engineer

The Tracking Board tracks spec scripts and deals in Hollywood. I joined as a senior engineer and was leading the team within the year. Most of that time went into basics the team didn't have yet: a staging environment, tests, deploy pipelines, and code review.

  1. Senior Software EngineerJan 2017 – Dec 2017
  2. Lead Software EngineerDec 2017 – Apr 2018

04Staging, tests, pipelines

The Rails app deployed straight to production. I added a staging environment and a test suite, then pipelines so a deploy stopped being a manual thing.

0 to 1staging envs
CIon every branch

05First time leading

First time leading a team. I kept shipping the bigger features on the roadmap while doing it, and set up the code review process the team kept after I left.

Leadin 11 months
Reviewon every PR
2012 to 20174 yrs

White Arrow

Software Engineer

White Arrow does less-than-truckload freight. I built their transportation management system in-house over four and a half years. The part I liked most was quoting.

06Freight as a graph

Railyards, warehouses and drivers went into a weighted graph, with the cost of moving between two of them as the edge weight, and shortest path ran over it. I wrote it in Go in 2013, which took some explaining at the time.

Dijkstrashortest path
Gomicroservice
Coast to coastnetwork

07Instant quotes

A customer on the web portal got a price right away. The number they saw was the graph cost plus our margin, and on a good route it still came in thirty percent under a straight truck.

30%off optimized routes
Instantportal quotes
0 humansin the loop
2009 to 20124 yrs

The freelance years

PagesActive, then Branning Group

Before that I freelanced. I ran a one-person shop called PagesActive doing animated sites in HTML5 and CSS3 at a time when most of that work was still Flash. Before PagesActive I subcontracted for Branning Group, building social networks, storefronts, Facebook games and the odd CMS for clients like Wyland, Audrina Patridge and Chrysler.

  1. Software Developer, Branning Group2009 – 2011
  2. Founder, PagesActive2011 – 2012
2003 to 2007

Where it started

Two years at Antelope Valley College, then Cal State Northridge for the bachelor's. AVC gave me a faculty-nominated award for software development, which I was prouder of than the degree.

2005 – 2007

California State University, Northridge

B.S. Computer Science
2003 – 2005

Antelope Valley College

Associate Degree, summa cum laude
  • Subject Area Award in Software Development, the annual faculty-nominated award
Now minus 17 years

That's all of it.

If you're hiring for backend work at scale, I'd like to talk. LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach me.

Languages
Go, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, JavaScript, React
Data
PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, OpenSearch
Cloud
AWS (SQS, ECS, Lambda, CloudWatch), Terraform, CloudFormation, Docker
Wire
gRPC, Protocol Buffers, GraphQL, REST
Shape
Microservices, Event-driven architecture, Distributed systems, Platform engineering
served from Tessryx · infra in terraform · one JSON datafile, one workflow, no framework, no build step
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