Suggestions
Ryan Kennedy
Professional Background
Ryan Kennedy is a highly experienced software engineer with over two decades of hands-on experience in creating reliable, scalable, and open software platforms. His deep technical acumen and leadership capabilities have allowed him to build high-performing engineering teams, focusing primarily on backend engineering and infrastructure. His managerial roles have not only honed his technical skills but have also enabled him to explore broader organizational concerns such as team dynamics, best practices in engineering, mentorship opportunities, and fostering team diversity.
Kennedy's commitment to quality software development is evidenced by his contributions to the Dropwizard project, an open-source web application framework that streamlines the development of RESTful web services. As an ongoing project committer, he actively collaborates with a community of like-minded software professionals, showcasing his commitment to not just creating software, but to empowering others in the industry.
Education and Achievements
Ryan's educational journey began at Bellarmine College Preparatory, where his foundation in technology and computer science was first established. He later pursued a Bachelor of Science degree at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where he likely honed his skills in software development, engineering principles, and collaborative work in technical projects.
Throughout his illustrious career, Ryan has held several significant roles at top-tier technology companies, contributing to major projects and the success of various organizations. Most notably, Ryan served as a Staff Software Engineer at Mode, where his expertise significantly impacted the company's engineering strategy. Additionally, he held various engineering and managerial positions at industry giants like Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. His expertise at Google as a Staff Software Engineer for YouTube placed him at the forefront of developing scalable video streaming solutions and enhancing user engagement through innovative technical solutions.
Notable Positions:
- Infrastructure Architect at Zendesk: Spearheading projects that enhance customer service solutions, focusing on reliable infrastructure.
- Director of Engineering at Yammer, Inc.: Leading and guiding engineering teams to build solutions that revolutionize corporate communication.
- Principal Engineer at Yahoo! Inc.: Playing a pivotal role in maintaining and developing innovative online services.
Ryan's extensive experience as a Senior Software Engineer at various organizations, including EarthLink and Jel Productions, has further enriched his capabilities in software development and engineering team management.
Achievements
Ryan Kennedy's journey is marked by several noteworthy achievements:
- Ongoing contributions to the Dropwizard project since its early inception, demonstrating commitment and technical prowess in the open-source community.
- Comprehensive experience in mentoring and fostering diverse engineering teams, reflecting a dedication to not only technical excellence but also to team collaboration and personal development.
- Mastered various aspects of backend infrastructure and services, contributing to scalable solutions that drive user satisfaction and business growth.
- Established himself as a thought leader within the software engineering community through his hands-on experience at leading tech companies and involvement in various organizations focused on diversity in tech, such as The Ada Initiative.
- Cultivated robust engineering cultures at organizations where he served as Director and Principal Engineer, impacting both product quality and team morale positively.
In addition to his technical capabilities, Ryan's emphasis on creating engaging and user-friendly products signifies his passion for technology that serves real-world needs, making his journey not only a career of impressive accomplishments but one rooted in the belief in the positive transformation technology can bring to teams and customers alike.
Highlights
Tell me nobody uses your data dumps without telling me nobody uses your data dumps…
- The dump is a single, bzip2 compressed, 90GB file containing hundreds of millions of records
- It takes 5 hours to download
- It takes 3 hours to decompress (and god help you if try it to disk without at least 1TB of disk space)
- The contents are a JSON array of objects (yes, it’s one line per object…but those objects are still wrapped in an array so you’ll need to ask your parser pretty-please to stream the contents of the array to you)
- The JSON objects are deeply nested and use multiple levels of polymorhpism
The simplest, most hospitable thing you could do is to break the single file up into multiple files. This will give your consumers the opportunity to make use of their multi-core laptops/EC2 instances/whatever. Without that, we’re at the mercy of single-threaded bzip2 decompression pegging a single core at 100% while the other dozen or so cores idly twiddle their thumbs.
Everything else is negotiable, but switching to a more performant format (e.g. Protocol Buffers) sure would speed some things up. JSON is surprisingly fast to deserialize (especially when compared to bzip2 decompression). Dealing with polymorphic types in JSON, however, is not pleasant.
So…who here uses AWS Cognito and, if so, how/why?
I feel like it might take the crown for “least well explained of the AWS services” that I’ve encountered (so far). At the same time, the box art makes me feel like MAYBE it might actually solve a problem I have that I would rather not solve myself (authentication for a multi-tenant application that would like to support username+password, OIDC, and SAML 2.0 with a minimum of effort and maintenance).
The fact that there’s no obvious, “here’s how company Z solved that problem with AWS Cognito, Ryan” type whitepaper is, I’m guessing, a tell (seriously, go to https://lnkd.in/gTRqXTvx and search for “cognito”…zero results).
