Career Timeline
- Own production reliability and incident response for business-critical SQL Server environments, including Availability Groups, failovers, upgrades, recovery, and other high-risk changes.
- Diagnose complex performance and concurrency problems across the full stack, including execution plans, indexing, blocking, deadlocks, tempdb, transaction logs, memory, storage, networking, Windows, and clustering.
- Build monitoring, automation, and operational safeguards that detect emerging risks, preserve diagnostic evidence, reduce alert noise, and enable safe, consistent remediation.
- Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, root cause analysis, implementation guidance, and clear communication of risks and tradeoffs to customers, engineers, and business stakeholders.
- Helped ensure consistent, sub-second page load performance of one of the world’s most popular websites.
- Interfaced with the broader community to discuss platform issues and improvements.
- Planned and led zero-downtime upgrades to SQL Server 2022 and SQL Server 2025.
- Collaborated with multiple teams to migrate SQL Server to cloud VMs (Azure and GCP).
- Reduced failover time of the 8TB Stack Overflow database from 30 minutes to 12 seconds.
- Helped deliver high availability and performance of SQL Server databases behind this leading retailer’s web properties.
- Established best practices, failover and latency runbooks, and query tuning methodologies.
- Optimized and standardized configuration of dozens of database servers handling massive swings in customer volume.
- Managed technical changes, backlog, and release schedule for Plan Explorer, one of the most popular free tools for SQL Server.
- Contributed in many ways to SQL Sentry, including benchmark studies, tutorials, and directly helping customers get the most out of the solution.
- Served as editor-in-chief of the SQLPerformance blog, managing authors, their contracts, and all content.
- Built schema, highly available databases, and a prototype world-class ad server from the ground up.
- Built web application for ad campaign management using classic Active Server Pages.
- Led upgrades to SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008.
- Between classes, ran a desktop publishing business, creating web sites and marketing materials for various clients locally and abroad, including the university library, Harley-Davidson of Toronto, Laurasia Resources, MerleFest, and Brushy Mountain Bee Farm.