Business Consulting

Kevin Burke - Consulting

I'm available for hire as a consultant. Here are some of the things I can do for your company:

Solve complex problems in production.

I helped Segment analyze their 6-million line AWS bill and allocate each line item to the team that incurred it. Read more about this here.

Teach your team about consistency.
At Shyp the biggest oncall problem we had was in driver assignment; two drivers would get assigned the same pickup, or a pickup would get "assigned" but have no driver, and a driver would get stuck. I wrote a state machine and a transaction library to fix these. I can teach your team the same techniques to write faster, more correct database queries.

Productionize your culture.

You shipped a bad error last week; how can you minimize the likelihood of shipping another one next week? Does the oncall rotation feel like an overwhelming burden for your team? The answer goes deeper than "focus more when writing the code", into a lot of human factors areas. I implemented a lot of tools and procedures at Shyp that helped the team learn from its mistakes, ship reliable code, and brought the number of pager incidents to an extremely low value. I'll work with your team to figure out where the problem areas are, and recommend/implement solutions.

Rewrite it in Go.

Do you have a server that no one understands, that needs better throughput, or fails in unpredictable ways? Is your team interested in kicking the tires with Go for a new project? I'm a contributor to the Go programming language, I've written (and rewritten) several services in Go for several companies, and can do the same for you. This will include a testing and deployment strategy, a method for loading configuration from the environment, and for starting and testing a local server.

Find problems in the build.

Intermittent build failures train your team that build failures are okay, and then you might miss a more important error that comes through. Or, an intermittent build failure might represent a real problem. I can teach your team how to isolate and force an intermittent problem to repeat on demand, then figure out how to fix it.