About Me

I help organizations keep the work baton moving.

Software may be eating the world, but the process of developing it is devouring the souls of everyone involved.

Tell me if any of these sound familiar:

  • You wait days for PRs to be reviewed
  • You’re completing a lot of work but not shipping much
  • The last 20% of your work taking 80% of the time
  • You release product, but your customers reaction is, ah, subdued
  • Technical debt is piling up
  • Leadership is getting more frustrated and taking a more “hands on” approach to management
  • Customers are frustrated with how long it takes for change requests to ship

It doesn’t have to be this way

What you’re experiencing is an absence of Flow (and by that we don’t mean the type library). Flow is how work progresses through a system, and high levels of Flow are correlated with outlandish sounding stats. For example, teams with high Flow have*:

  • 200x faster code and change deployment lead time
  • 60x higher change success in production deployments
  • 168x faster mean time to restore service
  • 2x more likely to exceed productivity, market share, and profitability goals
  • 50% higher market capitalization growth over three years
  • 50% less time spent remediating security issues

(*These are actual results captured and studied in the 2013 through 2016 as part of Puppet Labs’ State of DevOps Report)

Would you prefer to be on a team like that?

You can have a team that ships high-quality product reguarly

Hi, I’m Ethan…

Portrait of Ethan

…and I help teams overcome the above challenges. I’ve helped teams:

  • Go from deploying once a quarter to several times per day
  • Habitually complete and ship work rather than pile up inventory of incomplete work
  • Build trust and understanding through making work visible
  • Consistently deliver high-quality product
  • Rescue failing, high-profile efforts

But it’s probably not (just) a technology change that you need to make

Most places I’ve helped engaged with me because I have expertise in autonomous, microservices-based architecture and development. In fact, I wrote the book on building autonomous, event-sourced systems:

Get the book!

Roll up your sleeves and get ready to build Video Tutorials, the next-gen web-based learning platform. You'll build it as a collection of loosely-coupled autonomous services, developing a message store interface along the way.

In ebook or in print.

Your technology is the result of your people systems

These tools are good, but you typically have the technical reality you have because of your people systems.

Make no mistake, technical excellence is the table stakes to consistent, customer-delighting delivery. But to get from where you are to where you could be is going to involve more than changing programming languages or web frameworks.

If you want to change your results, you’ll have to change your culture.

I can help you with that

I don’t have secret methods. I study and apply Lean and DevOps principles, building relationships with those involved in the work. In fact, with enough time, you could do this all on your own.

If you’d like to go faster though, let’s talk.

Specifically, I can help you:

  • Understand why work stalls and get it flowing
  • Train your team in microservices architecture and development
  • Diagnose architectural problems
  • Develop your systems and provide technical oversight

You can find me in various places

Conference Talks

Utah Microservices Meetup

I run a meetup that leans heavily into the technical aspects but also treats the people systems aspects from time to time.

(Last modified on January 20, 2023)