Polibyte
In June 2025 a coworker interviewed me for the “Career Story” section of SurveyMonkey’s internal engineering blog. I’m sharing the results below. How did you decide on a career in Engineering? Growing up, I was both a tech and politics geek. My original career goal was to work as a researcher at the intersection of the two. Throughout school, I worked a series of part-time webdev and sysadmin jobs…
I had the privilege of presenting on Migrating Applications Without Fear at PyTennessee 2020 . My pitch was: Has your application has been running happily, but now it has to move? From the datacenter to the cloud, or from one cloud provider to another? Fear not! This talk covers strategies for making applications infrastructure-agnostic and handling the organizational challenges of a migration.…
At DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018 , I presented a lightning talk on reporting for ops team. I forgot to put that online until now! Hi, I’m Brian. I work for Mozilla helping run the backend services that power parts of Firefox. I’m here to tell you why you should care about reports, why they’ve become so hard, and what you can do about it. Like most of you here, my team depends on a lot of products to get…
I had the privilege of presenting on Instrumenting Python for Production at PyTennessee 2019 . My pitch was: You’ve implemented every feature, and written every test. Your code is ready to go to production. But how will you know what it’s doing once it’s deployed? This talk covers tools and strategies for understand your application’s behavior once it’s in the cruel hands of your users. I’ll cover…
At PyOhio , I presented a slightly-revised version of my Capacity and Stability Patterns talk. I also gave a mostly-impromptu lighting talk on building a statistical profiler and reading flame graphs. You can view my slides as a PDF here . Below, I’ll elaborate on each of them. Matt Robenolt and Craig Maloney had both referenced Python’s frame object heavily in their presentations on debugging.…
At DevOpsDays Atlanta , I presented an ignite talk on our recently-completed VPC migration at Eventbrite. This was my first time speaking under the constraints on the ignite format - 20 slides, automatically advancing every 15 seconds, and it was quite nerve-wracking! You can view my slides as a PDF here . My speaker notes for each slide are below. 1 Hi, I’m Brian from Eventbrite and I want to…
I had the privilege of presenting on Capacity and Stability Patterns at PyTennessee 2017 . My pitch was: “At Eventbrite, engineers are tasked with building systems that can withstand dramatic spikes in load when popular events go on sale. There are patterns that help us do this. Come learn about these patterns, how Eventbrite has adopted them, and how to implement them within your own code and…
When I moved to Nashville in 2014, I had a lot of uncertainty about what the tech scene was like. If you’d told me that within a few years I would be helping to run the city’s first DevOpsDays, I’m sure I would have scratched my head in puzzlement. Yet, we just wrapped it up! Much thanks goes out to The many sponsors who supported us The talented speakers who shared their stories The Nashville…
Last year I started keeping a list of conferences I was interested in. I had the idea that this might make a good community resource, so today I built webopsconferences.com . The goal is to be an up-to-date, no-frills list of conferences of interest to people working in the field of web operations . Contributing to it is as simple as editing a YAML file. I hope it’s useful to someone!
While preparing for my round of onsite interviews at Eventbrite, I spent some time coming up with questions tailored to the different roles of the people I’d be meeting with. I thought I would share those here. Here are some questions for project or engineering management: What do you think of the size and structure on engineering teams at your company? How does work on a project flow through…