You can read more about me at mikekrisher.com. I've been in the industry for over two decades. In recent years, I have been focused on people and process. I ✨still✨ write code but spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to solve the problems teams experience. I believe the majority of those problems are due to a lack of proper planning and setting expectations.

In my current role as Director of Engineering at Zyston, I’ve been responsible for the transition and integration of Blue Lava customers and products into the Zyston offering post acquisition. I've directly handled the operation and management of the Blue Lava tenants, supporting customers along the journey, all the while reducing costs.

As Director of Engineering at Blue Lava, I had the opportunity to help define our roadmap, strategize on hiring, introduce tools like story mapping and feature planning, work directly with customers on feature requests, manage the data platform teams, and implement automation that enabled my teammates to deliver more efficiently.

Before Blue Lava, I was Director of Engineering at Nike, leading several teams of over 40 engineers responsible for the transition to real-time data and analytics. I was asked to streamline several disparate systems into a singular data platform with real-time capabilities. Under my leadership, the teams implemented everything from data capture, ingestion, data pipelines, data warehousing, and machine learning. I focused on hiring and promotion, introducing roadmaps, budgeting, vendor relationships, establishing support efforts, and working cross-functionally with many internal stakeholders.

Before joining Nike, I directed the data platform efforts at Recurly with a core focus on building a high-functioning team. In the process, we introduced a DevOps culture that was soon adopted by the rest of the organization.

Throughout my 27+ years of experience, I have cultivated a comprehensive skill set spanning the entire technology stack. I have gained valuable expertise in various domains from JavaScript, Ruby, and Rust, to APIs and data platforms.

You’re welcome to read more about my experiences at https://mikekrisher.com.

• What I'm reading - The Art Thief, Michael Finkel
• What I'm listening to - The Cure - Songs of a lost world
• What I'm learning - Rust
• What I'm writing - Posts about teams from a mamanger's perspective, and Rust as of late
• What I'm drinking - Some roasts from Onyx Labs (Rogers, AK)

• Echo - an AI copilot for customer sucess managers (Typescript, Cloudflare, BigQuery)
• Tembo - a CLI for the Postgres as a platform company (Rust, Postgres, Docker)
• Schemabook - a SaaS I'm building, schema/data contract stuff (Rails, Postgres)
• Zyston - security services app (Rust, WASM, Events, langchain, Typescript, Kafka)
• Blue Lava - a SaaS app (Ruby and Rails, AWS, Events, Kafka, and Debezium)
• Nike - data platforms (AWS, Kafka, Kinesis, Lambda)
• Recurly - Data and Analytics platform for Fintech (AWS, Rails, Debezium, Kafka, MySQL)
• Kenna Security - a SaaS app (AWS, Rails, MySQL)
• Harvest - a SaaS app (Ruby and Rails)
• Proctor & Gamble - various projects for Mr. Clean, Swiffer, Dawn, etc (Service Oriented Architecture, Flash, JavaScript)
• Google - Gadgets, Gmail, another super secret thing that never saw the light of day (JavaScript)
• Cuban Council - whatever El Presidente sent my way, a large list of creative projects (ASP, Flash, PHP, JavaScript)
• Death Cab For Cutie - site admin for a few years (PHP)
• Macromedia and Adobe - Lots of Flash stuff, everyone remembers Flash right?