Hi! I’m Sam.

I’m (apparently) a software engineer. I’ve been working in the industry since around 2012. I worked for a number of years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, first in the IT department (I was one of the developers who actually built www.llnl.gov, including a bunch of fun times transforming ancient HTML from the early 90s into structured data to ingest into Drupal) and then later working in the Climate Science organization, building data visualization and analysis tools for scientists. After the 2016 election, it seemed like government funded climate research probably wasn’t going to be a huge growth industry, so I wound up moving to Google Search in early 2017. At Search, I grew from an IC to a Tech Lead Manager of three teams (10 folks all together), building features and infrastructure for billions of hits per day.

I care a lot about numbers. At LLNL I spent a ton of time working on building better ways to analyse and visualize data; at Google, I spent a ton of time doing the analyzing and visualizing. I probably have written more SQL than most other programming languages. I’m fascinated by data-driven decision making and product development; identifying key places where there’s room for improvement, drilling into the exact ways things go wrong, and building out targeted solutions. I also spend a lot of time contemplating organizational incentives, the impact of organizations on software and products, and juggling people problems with technical ones.

I’m starting a new gig at Stripe at the end of February 2022- looking forward to dipping my toes into a new space!