Hi there, I’m Mike! 👋

I’m an engineering manager at Capital One working on credit card servicing tech. I build products, grow teams, and occasionally write about software engineering and management.

What I Do

I spend my time on:

Learning, reading, and writing
Architecture and system design
Mentoring and leading a team building products and shipping features

Background

Things I’ve worked with along the way:

Python, Django, PySpark, ML, Hadoop
Java, Scala, Spring
AWS - a lot of it - EC2, EMR, ECS, EKS, Lambda, Glue, CloudFormation, and many more.
Side projects - a bit of Android and I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator for fun.

Outside of Work

My wife and I enjoy hiking, biking, traveling, and playing with our son and Shih Tzu.

Featured Posts

Saving Money on Spark Jobs With Karpenter

A typical modern Spark stack nowadays most likely runs Spark jobs on a Kubernetes cluster, especially for heavy usage. Workloads are moving away from EMR on EC2 to either EMR on EKS or open-source Spark on EKS.

When you’re running Spark on EKS, you probably want to scale your Kubernetes nodes up and down as you need them. You might only need to run a few jobs per day, or you might need to run hundreds of jobs, each with different resource requirements. Either way — you need to scale your EKS cluster up and down. You’re probably using the default Kubernetes cluster-autoscaler.

aws development kubernetes

Resetting the Blog

Hi there, I’m Mike.

🔭 I’m currently working on big data engineering with Spark on k8s on AWS at iSpot.tv.
🌱 I’m focusing on mentoring and coaching my team to improve their skills and release awesome products.
🌎 I occasionally write blog posts about software engineering and other topics.

Management and Software Engineering

I consider myself to be a software engineer at heart. Nowadays I’m trying to do less code-writing and more of everything else: