Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development.
I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 20 years of experience in the field.
I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value.
Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you.
Recent projects include:
+ Successfully lead a multi-team effort to re-engineer the core domain of a legacy monolithic application to a suite of well-designed, modern microservices utilising Domain-Driven Design, CQRS & Event Sourcing where appropriate for one of Africa's leading FinTech companies allowing them to scale their transaction processing from over 1 million active customers to over 10 million whilst simultaneously reducing their cloud spend by over 30%.
+ Successfully delivered large section of an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design.
+ Successfully designed & delivered large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base.
+ Successfully lead project to develop industry leading anti-motor fraud web application and API with advanced OLAP & OLTP system and data warehouse including one of Europe's largest anti-fraud databases for a Top 40 UK law firm.
> If my house is worth less than what I owe then moving (selling short) can make sense.
I believe this varies by state but I thought in some states the lender can come after you for the difference and in others you can just walk away (albeit with a credit ding).
Desirable metros seem to have very sticky prices. San Francisco, where I lived for 15 years, turned into a grotesque caricature of what it once was, but prices barely budged (and for most of that transition, they surged wildly). Sure, it's no longer the single most expensive rental market in the country, but it's still one of the highest despite quality of life degrading massively.
As someone on the carnivore diet and eats around 2lbs of beef a day, I'd attend if the steak was well priced. Don't care about the misplaced empathy when it comes to vegetarianism, but if the videos were interesting and the steak was good I'd be down.
I think with the amount of corporations and existing homeowners buying homes that the demand is strong enough to keep prices high no matter what happens. There are billions of dollars set aside to gobble up homes in the event of a price drop. In my area, 20 percent of homes are owned by investors and realtors delist homes that don’t sell as opposed to drop price.
Why do you think that I'm going to defend Biden? Politics are not sports, and I don't have a "favorite team". Your silly gotcha questions won't work on me because I don't reflexively defend people just because they are supported by corrupt political organizations.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and one person's crimes do not excuse another's. Arrest them all.
We need fundamental changes in our political system, and we're not going to be able to achieve anything if you keep pretending like these whataboutisms are worth anyone's time. Wake up.
Programming Strengths: Data Structures and Algorithms, Data Engineering, Programming Language Theory, Type Theory, No-Code, AI&Prompt Engineering, Complex & Unusual Domains (Healthcare, Fintech, Music, Arts, Sciences)
Other Skills: Leading Teams & Managing Projects, Productizing LLMs, Managing Interview Pipelines, Architecting & Implementing Greenfield Solutions, Education & Team Growth, Leading Communication and Coordination Between Stakeholders Across Teams and Organizational Silos
CV: Available Upon Request
Email: poetic.artifice@gmail.com
I am a seasoned (>15 years experience) full-stack staff-level software engineer specializing in the backend, systems architecture, AI, platform engineering, internal tools, prototyping, and data engineering. In addition to strong programming and architectural skills, I'm a force multiplier for any team in either role through the three T's -- teaching, talking, and tooling. I also hold a US patent in the AI space.
In the past, I've taught a number of scientists and students to code in python; I've led and managed a number of high-impact engineering teams of up to 12; and pioneered a number of no- and low-code solutions for stream processing, data model and query generation, form building, workflow systems, and front-end construction for a variety of industries, including those with strong regulatory requirements and complex business rules such as healthcare and fintech. >10% of all medicare applications and millions of individuals currently flow through pioneering no-code systems I conceived and built and have ran in production for over a decade.
More recently, I've built a no-code automated form-filler; a no-code web scraper (and an AI for generating such scrapers from a spec and 1-3 example urls from a page); and a workflow engine for coordinating LLMs and other generative AI processes, and on top of this a platform for both minimizing hallucinations and working with documents that are far too large for existing context window inputs or outputs using a novel, patented process that I invented; and applied these tools to various contracted projects requiring analysis and and cross-checking of information and other forms of integrity across textual and video/audio corpus data in a variety of domains (fiction and non-fiction).
I am also an improvisational pianist, published poet, and I've created novel algorithms and tools for studying and composing both music and poetry, which I have given a talk on at a recent functional programming conference.
I have extensive experience working for and running startups, software consulting shops, with some mid-sized company engineering experience as well; these give me a unique insight into speaking with customers and internal stake-holders, translating between engineering and other departments, gathering requirements, aligning stake-holders across departments on a vision and attainable timeline, and architecting/building/taking ownership over significant internal and customer-facing areas of responsibility.
If any of the above seems like a match for you and your organization or project, don't hesitate to reach out. I am available for both short- and long-term contracts.
But the parent didn't really argue anything, they just linked to a Wikipedia article about Raytheon. Is that supposed to intrinsically represent "immorality"?
I can totally understand where you are coming from with this comment. It does feel a bit frustrating that people are rediscovering things that were written in books 30/40/50 years ago.
However, I think this is awesome for the industry. People are rediscovering basic things, but if they didn't know about the existing literature this is a perfect opportunity to refer them to it. And if they were aware, but maybe not practicing it, this is a great time for the ideas to be reinforced.
A lot of people, myself included, never really understand which practices are important or not until we were forced to work on a system that was most definitely not written with any good practices in mind.
My current view of agentic coding is that it's forcing an entire generation of devs to learn software project management or drowning under the mountain of debt an LLM can produce. Previously it took much longer to feel the weight of bad decisions in a project but an LLM allows you to speed-run this process in a few weeks or months.
> however the success of rails was also its biggest albatross.
Albatrosses are good luck. The "albatross around one's neck" metaphor applies when someone takes a good omen and destroys it, so they are forced to wear it around their neck as a reminder of the awful thing they did. Therefore it's not the albatross that's bad luck, but killing it that is.
Sorry to be off topic -- I only say this as it's my lifelong quest to rehabilitate the image and reputation of the majestic albatross.
If you give a manager a chatbot, they’ll want a sandbox. If you give them a sandbox, they’ll want to push to production. If you give them a path to production, your on-call shift will never end…
I trully hate how absurdly over-hyped this LLM concept of AI is. However, it can do some cool things. Normally that's the path to PMF. The real problem is the revenue. There is no extant revenue model whatsoever. But there are industries that are described as "a business of pennies" Ex. telephony. Someone may yet eek out a win. But the hype-to-reality conversion will come first.
I am a freelancer/contractor who specializes in developing augmented reality, spatial computing, and computer vision apps for iOS & visionOS. Several of my apps were handpicked and featured worldwide by Apple. I've worked with solo founders, startups that went on to get acquired (OpenAI, Shopify), and R&D teams at large corporations.
If you have any questions or you want to get a conversation started: Shoot me a message & let's talk!
People aren’t collectively paying him between $3 million a year and five million (estimated 40k+ subscribers paying a minimum of $120 a year) just because he doesn’t have ads.
>If you ever feel the need that you have so many interdependent services that you need something more complex than RC, then you might have an actual architectural problem to be honest.
Frontend, Backend, Devops
Full Stack Engineer with 25+ years of experience in complex Frontend components, Backend, and DevOps. Open Source Creator of libraries with [~10k stars ](https://github.com/istarkov). Former maintainer of Recompose. Architected and built end-to-end systems from scratch, scaling platforms to 1 million+ users and 20M daily requests. Master's degree in Mathematics.
Rust remains maybe the last true community game that's just solid all the way through where the studio is good to its players and doesn't patronize and betray them. I can have the sort of fun I would have had 20 years ago in Rust, and everything else feels like monocultural slop by comparison.
I wish more of my friends wanted to play it, and wish I had more time for it.
If the mods aren't going to enforce the rules what other options do we have? Serious question. This ad has been posted in 11/12 threads this year. Perhaps there should be a cooldown on the same posting after 3 months?
Job applicants are under enough stress as it is, they shouldn't be fooled into wasting their time applying to ghost jobs.
I share your abhorrence but are you really shocked? "Think of the children", "Stop the terrorists," these have been the foundations for the erosion of personal liberty for the past thirty years.
