Chris Dickinson

Experience

Engineer @ Seaplane, Inc

from Jun 2022 to Apr 2023

I worked with a small team to define & build a compute product, understand & implement security boundaries (including networking), and speed up shipping iterations. Got a crash course on networking. Built an on-line management system for Nomad using Rust. Additionally: built internal development environment tools to unblock multiple teams. These tools formed the basis for the CI system. Used multiple cloud providers during the course of this work: Hetzner, GCP, NetActuate, AWS, Azure, through a combination of in-house and external tools (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi.)

I approached each task with a laser focus on automation in the aim of maximizing return on effort, while validating the results of my work with peers.

Principal Engineer @ Eaze Solutions, LLC

from Apr 2018 to May 2022

Replaced the deployment system at Eaze. This cut monthly infrastructure cost in half, took deploy time down from an hour to two minutes, improved morale across teams by reducing contention on shared environments, and allowed us to scale the department by decoupling teams from one another.

I worked to validate that new deploy system with our fellow engineers: answering questions, incorporating their feedback, and making sure the project was a success by extending ownership over the end result to the entire team. 1

Additionally, I worked on platform tools to ensure a base level of capabilities across our services, ensuring all teams had access to quality monitoring, logging, and observability. As teams began adopting TypeScript, I ported JavaScript internal tools for their use.

Finally, I worked to give the team porting our monolithic C# application tools to validate their changes. This involved coordinating a 30 person team in the construction of a series of high level integration tests across multiple areas of software engineering (mobile eng, website engineering, & backend engineering.) I gave a presentation on the results to Honeycomb. 2

Staff Engineer @ npm, Inc.

from Jul 2015 to Apr 2018

Kept the npm registry running as it scaled from 400 million to 9 billion downloads a week between 2015 and 2018.

Worked primarily as a high level individual contributor, responsible for writing the ACL system, publish flow, static asset (package.json and tarball) serving, billing system, and React-based website. Coordinated team efforts as a project manager when needed, and acted as an engineering manager.

I successfully shipped major migrations of the billing system, the content delivery network (To Cloudflare Edge Workers from Fastly VCL), the ACL system, and the package publication flow. I assisted in infrastructure work, provisioning servers using Terraform and AWS and building deploy tooling in Node and Ansible. I participated in on-call rotation using Pagerduty and was relied upon to fix operational problems when both on- and off-call.

Member of Node.js Technical Steering Committee @ Walmart Labs

from Jun 2014 to Jun 2015

Participated on the io.js Technical Committee, Node.js Technical Committee, and the Node.js Technical Steering Committee. Coordinated early efforts to add promises to core, added history support to the Node REPL, and helped define the initial charter system for working groups. Continued on in my role on the TSC until mid-2017.

Senior Engineer @ Urban Airship

from Mar 2012 to May 2014

Defined standards and testing practices for frontend JavaScript; developed a dashboard for push notification (& html-based "rich push") authoring. Grew a team of JavaScript developers from 1 to 5; evangelized JS use through the company.

Web Developer @ Mediaphormedia from 2010 to Feb 2012

Web Developer @ Domain51 from 2009 to 2010

Junior Developer @ Absorbent, Inc. from 2008 to 2009