Willow Pigeon

My Career Trajectory

…and an Open Call for Consulting Work

Hey folks! I’m pleased to announce that I’m opening myself up for consulting and short-term contracting work. Let’s start with a little bit of my history-

I’ve been working in the tech industry for just over 11 years and in that time, I’ve gone by a few different names, worked across multiple verticals, and built a strong foundation of effective generalism and soft-skills to collaborate and create impact.

I’ve worked in:

  • Mobile app development.

  • Support engineering / developer support.

  • Developer tools.

  • Back-end and data engineering.

  • DevOps and infrastructure.

I love opportunities where my cross-functional experience is welcomed and I can incorporate my diverse mix of experience throughout the stack to design, build, operate and support distributed systems.

I have experience with Kubernetes, Terraform/OpenTofu, AWS (EKS, Aurora Postgres, RDS Postgres), GoLang, Rust, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bitrise, Buildkite, CircleCI), DataDog, Grafana, Swift, GCP (GKE, BigQuery, Stackdriver Google Cloud Operations), Docker, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

I’m eager to work more with agentic LLMs, Elm, Zig, and Haskell.

Career History

At the beginning of my career, I was awarded a scholarship from Apple to attend WWDC 2014. This fuelled my curiosity and set the pace for me to work on exciting projects, some notable examples of which are:

  • LineHop: A nightlife app that built relationships with local bars, night clubs and venues around the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) to offer reservations, bidding on spots to jump lines, and provide real-time insights into how busy venues with near real-time crowd estimates based on CoreBluetooth beacons.

  • Iris: A healthcare/safety app that monitored geolocation changes to infer possible hospitalizations or disasters to alert emergency contacts. 

  • Reveal: A companion app to support a UBC research study about autism in children to analyze incoming sensor data and provide an accessible iPadOS experience to collect patient observations.

This put me on a path to work in open-source and eventually support engineering, particularly with developer tools. I loved (and continue to enjoy) the rabbit holes that supporting developers come with. Some notable examples of these years include:

  • Lighthouse Labs: Mentoring iOS bootcamp students with Swift and Objective-C assignments, projects, and concepts.

  • Maintaining open-source projects ZipArchive, Quick, and Jazzy.

  • Realm: Answering incoming support tickets, creating example projects, rewriting/expanding documentation, and fixing bugs in the Swift, Objective-C and JavaScript SDKs.

  • CircleCI and TravisCI: Answering incoming support tickets, optimizing build configurations, debugging flaky test suites, working 1-on-1 with teams to determine opportunities for additional features to enhance productivity and reduce developer toil.

Working in support engineering afforded me many opportunities to learn something new, particularly with rapid exposure to new programming languages, stacks, different industries and compliance environments. The fast pace encouraged me to push further into engineering focused tasks, especially as it related to increasing productivity to help my team deliver on our mandate to support developers better. Some notable examples:

  • PSPDFKit: Creating a containerized self-service app to ship logs and metrics from self-hosted installations of PSPDFKit for Web/Server to be debugged by internally. The pilot of this alleviated a lot of back and forth between support, engineering and customers since everything could be shared transparently and on-demand. 

  • Bitrise: Creating a support facing tool that hooked into BigQuery and provided real-time access to user data for build logs, billing data, and metrics that previously had a 2-4 hour delay. This enabled our team to support the issue directly without the need to rely on screenshots and Gist links.

With the desire to be more hands-on and shed full-time support responsibilities, I pivoted my career to working fully in a software engineering capacity, which also incidentally was my first big push into consulting. This includes:

  • Valora: Leveraging my experience in mobile and CI/CD developer tools, I joined Valora to work on improving flakiness in a React Native Detox E2E test suite. Rewriting test cases to be more resilient and optimized for automated environments. Additionally, I designed a custom CI/CD scheduler on top of GitHub Actions that leveraged ephemeral MacStadium instances and Buildkite to provide additional firepower during high demand peaks using a circuit breaker pattern. 

  • cLabs: I worked on observability systems, including migrating logs and metrics from Stackdriver to Grafana Cloud for a group of GCP GKE Kubernetes clusters, as well as collaborating with teams to increase coverage, build dashboards, alerts, and optimize GoLang services to be more reliable and resource aware.

  • Entropy: I implemented developer and compliance tools from scratch, such as GitHub Actions, Terraform, Okta SSO, and 1Password Secrets, as well as conducted in-depth testing for DevOps/developer experience for a Rust protocol and SDK within the context of running replicas in Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, EC2+ASG, and Docker Compose.

  • Dora: I lead the architecture and development of a distributed data platform using Rust and Aurora Postgres to capture high volume blockchain data from multiple ecosystems to filter, contextualize and repackage data for API consumption. Additionally, I also created API endpoints in GoLang to service the front-end and provide partner integrations.

  • I worked with several small startups to re-architect their systems and create micro-services from monolith codebases written in Node.js, Deno JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, and GoLang.

Present Day

Today I work at Wealthsimple on a Platform Engineering team, specifically tasked with expanding and operating its Kubernetes platform. This includes all of my favourite aspects of my career:

  • Supporting other teams with infrastructure requests, providing project-based guidance, reviewing PRs, and knowledge sharing.

  • Responding to incidents and supporting operations for several Kubernetes clusters and implementing patches.

  • Implementing features and expanding the functionality of the Kubernetes platform for our users and the business.

What I can help with

  • Green field projects that could benefit from a fresh perspective leveraging my experience from working across the stack.

  • Completing migrations or time consuming work that have been deprioritized but contribute to developer toil or technical debt.

  • Create briefs and/or deep-dives for tool/platform evaluations, researching projects, or (informal) compliance evaluations.

  • Working with tech I have proficiency in or flexibility for me to pick up something new.

  • Presenting workshops in group settings or mentoring people 1-on-1.  

  • Something else?

What I can’t help you with

  • I’m not interested in unpaid labour for stock (although volunteer labour is potentially available for non-profits, and mentorship to early career and/or LGBTQ folks).

  • I’m not interested in writing smart contracts or low-effort code fixing projects.

  • I’m not interested in commitments or projects that require travelling. Otherwise, I’m located in Vancouver, British Columbia and available for in-person meet-ups granted covid precautions (KN95 masked).

Specific rates, compensation, and availability depend on the specific dates, type of project and time commitment required.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me over LinkedIn or email at willow dot finch at fastmail dot com. You can also find me on GitHub.