About
I’m a software engineer and open source evangelist based in Seattle. I’m a Principal Engineer at AWS working on Amazon ElastiCache and MemoryDB, and I help lead Valkey, the open-source, community-driven fork of Redis. I also think fractals are really pretty.
Projects
Valkey core team member
One of the founding core team members of Valkey, the open source, community driven fork of Redis under the Linux Foundation, helping lead the project since the fork in 2024.
Redis core member
One of the members of the Redis project from 2020 until I was kicked out in 2024. Introduced ACL v2, the next version of the Redis access control system, supporting different access to specific keys as well as compound access controls.
Fractal visualizations
A WebGL-based visualization tool for Mandelbrot and Julia sets, and an STL file builder for 3D-printing them.
Project Euler
Ongoing progress solving Project Euler problems.
Talks & media
Scaling Valkey the Right Way: Kubernetes at XL Scale
What it takes to run a sharded, replicated Valkey cluster spanning hundreds of nodes on Kubernetes: cluster bus communication, DNS-based discovery, resource planning, operator-based automation, and keeping gossip traffic, CPU spikes, and failover delays under control.
When Every Bit Counts: How Valkey Rebuilt Its Hashtable for Modern Hardware
Valkey rebuilt its core hashtable for modern hardware, replacing a pointer-heavy textbook design with a cache-efficient open-addressing layout inspired by Swiss tables. This talk walks through the new design, the roughly 20-25% memory savings it delivered, and the benchmarking, testing, and production edge cases that come with rewriting a data structure at the heart of the system.
How Maintainers Can Build Their Way Through the AI Flood
Keynote with Jacob Murphy on how cheap AI-generated code lets maintainers raise the bar on tests and validation, how Valkey uses AI agents for security provenance checks and backporting, and why project vision and governance must stay human-led.
More talks
- Scaling Up and Out: How Valkey Does Both
- Panel: The Philosophy and Power of Open Source Leadership
- From Our Customers to the Community: How AWS Contributes Upstream
- Tales from the Trenches: How Caches Fail at Scale
- Your Core Infrastructure Should Be Vendor Neutral and Open Source
- You Never Know When You Need a Fork: Lessons Learned Building Valkey
- What's New in Valkey
- How We Built GLIDE: A Highly Reliable Multi-language Client for Valkey and Redis OSS
- Build a Cloud Native Asynchronous Messaging System For Scale With Redis
- Anatomy of a Redis command