👋 Heyo, it's me Zander 👋

whois

Polyglot, problem solver and remote-worker, and engineering leader. I enjoy solving problems according to their technical specifications, ecosystem support, business longevity¹.

I've been the CTO of a 50 person startup, a Sr. Director of Engineering, led a deeply technical platform group ~25 software engineers and ~3 managers and most recently built out our Database Platform Team as the Tech Lead Manager and retired to being the Architecture Lead for Platform.

I'm deeply interested in results and less interested in the exact tools/technology we use.

📜 My recent blog posts

• TiDB Resource Controls: 2 years into Best Practices (1 month ago)
• Field Reference Paths as Transactional Extensions (1 month ago)
• Surviving Database Migrations: Ambitious and a little crazy (1 month ago)
• Incremental Technical Automation (1 year ago)
• 2024: The Rise of S3-Backed OLTP Databases (1 year ago)
• Database Best Practices (1 year ago)
• 2024 State of the Union (2 years ago)
• Improved e2e testing by replacing bats-core with deno+dax (2 years ago)
• DBOps Automating infrastructure operations (2 years ago)

👷 What I'm currently working on

• zph/hermit-packages - hermit package declarations (2 days ago)
• zph/dotfiles - My dotfiles (1 week ago)
• zph/terraform-provider-mongodb - MongoDB Terraform Provider (1 month ago)

🌱 My latest projects

• zph/terraform-provider-mongodb - MongoDB Terraform Provider
• zph/gotester - Golang test digester for nicer outputs
• zph/gorun - Minimal execution wrapper for go

📖 Interests and Excitement:

• Founding my own startup
• Databases at scale
• Log Architecture and Data pipelines [eg]
• High throughput distributed & fault tolerant systems

🪖 Career Priorities

1. Rapid growth and learning
2. While delivering high business impact
3. That's sustainable and low maintenance
4. Striking the right balance of speed and precision (depending on circumstance)
5. Enjoying the work I do and the people I work with

🏙 Business Domains

• Fintech
• Small/medium startups
• High traffic websites
• Media companies

👨‍💻 Engineering Domains

• Platform
• Online Storage
• Infrastructure
• Developer Efficiency

🏫 Technologies I want to spend more time with professionally and personally (ORDER BY interest DESC):

• NewSQL, NoSQL, ClassicSQL
  • TiDB
  • FoundationDB
  • Postgresql
  • MySQL
  • MongoDB² tooling, operations and cluster management
• GRPC & Protobufs (they're the future 😍 and the past 🤔)
• Golang (fast, predictable, dull and small syntax surface area 🐿️))
• Rust or Haskell (to improve my craft of software engineering)³
• Elixir (in the right niche circumstances and for the pragmatism of OTP 🔮)⁴

I enjoy programming, pairing (1-1), remote teams, Open Source Software, databases, commandline tools, FP and some other important buzzwords.

I'm very fortunate to be happily employed with a few standing offers but if you want to offer me the chance to work on challenging things with kind folks, I'm happy to chat. To set realistic expectations⁵, it's unlikely I'll be drawn away from my current team because they're wonderful folks <3.

🔭 Latest releases I've contributed to

• zph/terraform-provider-mongodb (v0.1.0, 1 month ago) - MongoDB Terraform Provider
• zph/runbook (1.0.0, 1 month ago) - 📖 CLI for dynamic runbooks: a structured and auditable approach to creating and executing operational procedures, bridging the gap between simple shell scripts and more complex tooling 💻
• LaunchPlatform/beanhub-import (1.3.0, 3 months ago) - Beanhub-import is a simple, declarative, smart, and easy-to-use library for importing extracted transactions from beanhub-extract. It generates Beancount transactions based on predefined rules.

🔨 My recent Pull Requests

• Fix MySQL schema migrations for TiDB compatibility on zph/temporal (4 weeks ago)
• zh improve documentation on zph/terraform-provider-mysql (1 month ago)
• Update Golden Tests for better review on zph/terraform-provider-mongodb (1 month ago)

📓 Gists

• jira-cli (2 years ago)
• Deno wrapper for pagerduty-cli (3 years ago)
• EBS disk warming script using fio (3 years ago)

⭐ Recent Stars

• manaflow-ai/cmux - Ghostty-based macOS terminal with vertical tabs and notifications for AI coding agents (1 day ago)
• MarkSRobinson/nginx-pkl - (1 day ago)
• solod-dev/solod - A subset of Go that translates to C (4 days ago)

📫 How to reach me

• Blog: https://blog.xargs.io
• Github: https://github.com/zph
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zph/

-ZPH zander@xargs.io

To send secure messages, use my public keys on github combined with age