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About me

Photo of Laban

Hi! I'm Laban!

I'm a software engineer, technologist, and leader who believes in empowering teams with autonomy, clear strategy, agile practices, and tools that help deliver awesome products to customers. I also still write code and build things, both because it keeps me connected with the tech world, and because it makes me happy.

I’ve been working in software since the late nineties, and I’ve been in the platform engineering space for the last 15 years. During that time I’ve also done a bunch of engineering leadership/management and architecture.

I’m currently working at SimpliSafe as a Distinguished Engineer.

I live and work in the Boston area on a small farm with my wife, kids, and dog.

Stuff I believe in​

  • Servant leadership: The best leaders empower teams with autonomy and clarity of intent, and foster a culture of delivery and empathy for customers. For an Architect, the most important tool is alignment.

  • Core Agile principles: The good parts: (build to learn and fail fast, iterate with real customer feedback, rapidly deliver incremental value, optimize for lead-time). I'm not interested in pushing any particular flavor of Agile methodology/religion.

  • DevOps philosophy: If you give teams both freedom in how to build things, and accountability for operating what they build, you get a virtuous cycle and really productive teams.

Technical Background​

  • I spend a lot of time working on microservices/distributed architectures, cloud-native, platform engineering, observability, chaos engineering; generally stuff to scale systems up with moderately sized teams.

  • I know about a dozen languages, maybe half of them really well. I've been going deeper into systems programming lately, mostly with Go and Rust.

  • I'm currently interested in getting deeper into the cloud native open-source ecosystem (e.g. building controllers/operators, contributing)

  • I've built several very large and complex front-end apps. As a result, I have pretty strong senses about how to think about client/server architecture, what kind of crazy things you can do with a browser, and how to squeeze insane performance out of a web app. I've seen various client-side frameworks through the years (I'm admittedly very, very rusty), and I've become enamored of unidirectional flow, immutable data, and virtual DOM rendering (i.e react/redux).