Biography

If you’re here to find out more about me, this is as good a place to start as any.

Professional

I finished grad school at Georgia Tech in 2007 where I spent a lot of time doing computer science related research in RNOC (mostly around CPR, a distributed networking introspection platform). I was the project manager for Gallery over 10 years, and I’m been the webmaster and a race team member over at Faster Mustache. In the Summer of 2007 I interned at Google for the Platforms team, from January 2008 until July 2012 I worked in Datacenter Operations SugarCRM ending up as the Operations Manager. In August 2011 I started at Highgroove Studios as a Software Developer and morphed into the Methodologist. In November 2012, we merged with Big Nerd Ranch where I ran the Internal Operations team. In January 2015 I headed over to Salesforce Pardot where I managed a handful of teams as Senior Manager, Software Engineering including hiring everyone, shipping new features on the legacy platform, and building the brand new B2B Marketing Analytics. In March 2018 I headed up to Westport, Connecticuit for 2 years to be a Technology General Manager at Bridgewater Associates (the largest hedge fund in the word) to experience their culture in-person while managing a handful of teams working on web applications, and in May 2020 I moved back to Atlanta and started as Director of Engineering at Zenput, managing more teams working on more web applications and their infrastructure. After 2 years, I headed over to Statype as employee #4 to build something new. We weren’t able to find product market fit, and in 2023 I started looking for my next thing.

Endorphins and Neurogenesis

I’ve ridden bicycles since I was a little kid, and there are not many things I would rather do than go for a long ride. Mountain biking is my favorite, and other things that improve my fitness like running and road biking make mountain biking that much more enjoyable. More about this over on bikes, come join me for a ride or a run sometime.

Sounds and Sights

I’ve taken pictures of everything from Lego constructions to mountain passes. I don’t really consider myself a ‘photographer’ because I never really go looking to take a particular photograph, but I do enjoy capturing my experiences and sharing them. Head right over to flickr or vimeo to see. Adobe Lightroom and Final Cut Pro each get a good bit of use.

Sometimes I make music, and frequently I listen to music. I play cello, bass guitar, a bit of piano, and a little guitar guitar and you can hear some things I’ve made on my media projects page.. I’ll listen to any music that has soul and some that doesn’t. My Last.fm page has a lot of the details, but isn’t that up to date.

Hacking

I’m a hacker at heart. I enjoy taking things apart, putting them back together, and building new things with the parts. What started with Legos and Erector Sets eventually turned into writing software and a pretty comprehensive set of ‘DIY’ skills. I’m happy to help you with some C code or a broken bicycle part. Some things I’ve hacked with:

Personality

I’m an INTJ, but only slightly I. I’m a high C in my DISC profile, and an even higher C in adaptive mode. People that know me well know that they can count on me to be on time (or early), have the master plan that works for everyone, and solve hard problems in the best way possible with everyones interests in mind. People that don’t know me sometimes think I’m impersonal, quick to jump to conclusions, or boring. I take a deliberate approach to everything I do, and seek out problems to solve.

Deliberate Action

I am very deliberate in how I go about doing things. My full-blown project about how this all works will launch eventually at everythingzero.com, but this paragraph will have to do for now. My every-day workflow consistes of OneNote, Remember The Milk, Feedly, OneDrive, KeePassX, and a web browser. Some thoughts on managing money are on a blog post from 2013: Dollars and Sense.

Reading

While most of the things in Feedly don’t really count, I spend a bit of time reading. I have a list of books I’ve read. I subscribe to and highly recommend these periodicals:


ckdake

ckdake is me. This name came about because it was the first screenname I came up with that I could get on AOL in the late 90s that didn’t have numbers in it, and it’s stayed unique over the years. If you search the internet for it, everything that shows up is pretty much guaranteed to be me.

‘Extracurricular’

Things That Are Interesting

finding the solution, corndogs, doritos, good deals, graphs, staying up late, getting up early, getting packages in the mail, scalable web infrastructure, cheese, learning new things, all things bike, network fault detection and localization, open source software, technology and innovation policy, network performance, data sharding, Faster Mustache, the human form, giving gifts, empty inboxes, information, data synchronization, distributed application architectures, taquitos