In May of 2021, I started working at Kinotek where the seed funding still hadn’t hit the bank and the product was still in alpha. It was a pretty big risk, but to me it was an even bigger opportunity to test myself and grow myself. I’ve often referred to it as “battle testing my ego”, and I’m glad I pushed myself to know whether or not I was capable of something rather than just imagine that I probably am.
When I joined Kinotek, I was the most experienced software engineer on the team, and the only one with industry experience. I brought everything I had learned from my time at Gracenote and helped shape the software development and feedback-driven development processes, I rebuilt the API, and split the product from a Unity build into a React web app, a serverless backend data processing ETL pipeline, and a BablyonJS 3D visualization layer. After those changes we were able to iterate faster and deploy more reliably. I established CI/CD pipelines for the different parts of the stack and templated our infrastructure so that everything was documented in code. One of my proudest achievements was leading a migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL, which better fit our data and provided us with huge performance improvements, and the team was able to complete the migration cleanly within a month. I like to attribute this to three things: my team working incredibly well together and individually, my relentless organization and preparation in order to give the team an opportunity to succeed each day, and having a small enough database that we weren’t trying to move mountains. There’s so much I can say about working at Kinotek because it is such a huge part of my life and filled with so many incredible accomplishments and even more failures. Ultimately, I’m grateful to myself for taking the less secure path and allowing myself to train and grow in so many different ways.
In March of 2024, I left Kinotek to join another startup called Alara.