Polyglot, problem solver and remote-worker, and engineering leader. I enjoy solving problems according to their technical specifications, ecosystem support, business longevity1.
I've been the CTO of a 50 person startup, a Sr. Director of Engineering, led a deeply technical platform group ~25 software engineers and ~3 managers and most recently built out our Database Platform Team as the Tech Lead Manager and retired to being the Architecture Lead for Platform.
I'm deeply interested in results and less interested in the exact tools/technology we use.
- Incremental Technical Automation (3 months ago)
- 2024: The Rise of S3-Backed OLTP Databases (3 months ago)
- Database Best Practices (4 months ago)
- 2024 State of the Union (6 months ago)
- Improved e2e testing by replacing bats-core with deno+dax (6 months ago)
- DBOps Automating infrastructure operations (10 months ago)
- NLB Target Handling During pre-change and post-change Hooks (2 years ago)
- Use presigned AWS STS get-caller-identity for authentication (2 years ago)
- On Reliability (2 years ago)
- zph/dotfiles - My dotfiles (1 day ago)
- zph/runbook - 📖 CLI for dynamic runbooks: a structured and auditable approach to creating and executing operational procedures, bridging the gap between simple shell scripts and more complex tooling 💻 (1 week ago)
- facebook/dotslash - Simplified executable deployment (4 weeks ago)
- zph/dotslash-packages -
- zph/tome-cli -
- zph/exec - Exec syscall wrapper via ffi for deno
- Founding my own startup
- Databases at scale
- Log Architecture and Data pipelines [eg]
- High throughput distributed & fault tolerant systems
- Rapid growth and learning
- While delivering high business impact
- That's sustainable and low maintenance
- Striking the right balance of speed and precision (depending on circumstance)
- Enjoying the work I do and the people I work with
- Fintech
- Small/medium startups
- High traffic websites
- Media companies
- Platform
- Online Storage
- Infrastructure
- Developer Efficiency
🏫 Technologies I want to spend more time with professionally and personally (ORDER BY interest DESC):
- NewSQL, NoSQL, ClassicSQL
- TiDB
- FoundationDB
- Postgresql
- MySQL
- MongoDB2 tooling, operations and cluster management
- GRPC & Protobufs (they're the future 😍 and the past 🤔)
- Golang (fast, predictable, dull and small syntax surface area 🐿️))
- Rust
or Haskell(to improve my craft of software engineering)3 - Elixir (in the right niche circumstances and for the pragmatism of OTP 🔮)4
I enjoy programming, pairing (1-1), remote teams, Open Source Software, databases, commandline tools, FP and some other important buzzwords.
I'm very fortunate to be happily employed with a few standing offers but if you want to offer me the chance to work on challenging things with kind folks, I'm happy to chat. To set realistic expectations5, it's unlikely I'll be drawn away from my current team because they're wonderful folks <3.
- jdx/mise (v2025.3.0, 2 days ago) - dev tools, env vars, task runner
- dagu-org/dagu (v1.16.4, 6 days ago) - A compact, portable, and language-agnostic workflow engine. It aims to solve greater problems.
- denoland/deno (v2.2.2, 6 days ago) - A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript.
- Fix issue with task_summary breaking if planning=True on zph/crewAI (1 day ago)
- Zh get tests running on zph/session-manager-plugin (1 week ago)
- zh move to ruff on zph/runbook (3 weeks ago)
- jira-cli (7 months ago)
- Deno wrapper for pagerduty-cli (2 years ago)
- EBS disk warming script using fio (2 years ago)
- ray-project/ray - Ray is an AI compute engine. Ray consists of a core distributed runtime and a set of AI Libraries for accelerating ML workloads. (1 day ago)
- deepseek-ai/3FS - A high-performance distributed file system designed to address the challenges of AI training and inference workloads. (1 day ago)
- deepseek-ai/smallpond - A lightweight data processing framework built on DuckDB and 3FS. (1 day ago)
- Blog: https://blog.xargs.io
- Github: https://github.com/zph
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zph/
-ZPH [email protected]
To send secure messages, use my public keys on github combined with age
Footnotes
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Low excitement, high productivity and reliable/performant systems ↩
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MongoDB and I have a complicated relationship. It helped successfully launch and scale three startups of mine and was a poor choice for datastore in 2 of 3. I've come to appreciate deeply what it accomplished in the 1 of 3 where it was the most correct choice available and also look forward to evolving onto a new platform that can learn from the architectural mistakes of MongoDB. Ironically, by knowing it deeply and the alternatives, I've become hawkish defender of Mongo when people throw around technically barbs about this datastore. It's as if the trauma I've experienced have bonded me to it like Gollum and The Ring. ↩
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Rust is a language that can still help me grow as a software engineer and one I'd enjoy a sincere practical reason to become proficient with. ↩
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At this point I'd be disinclined to choose Elixir unless the focus was realtime messaging and we were gaining key advantages from OTP. ↩
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If I look at all offers/outreach, I've accepted around 1 in 500 ↩