Hi, I'm Kenn

A principal/staff software engineer living in Tokyo. 17 years building distributed systems and high-throughput data platforms, the kind that fall over at scale if you get them wrong.

My opinions are obviously my own.

Systems I've designed and built:

• An ad-serving platform running at over 20,000 req/s at ~5 ms, on a handful of servers.
• A data analytics platform ingesting almost 10 TB/day at 400,000 records/second.
• Over $450,000/year cut from AWS spend through cost analysis and application optimisation.
• Hold two US patents and three AWS certifications.

Mostly Java. Also Kotlin, Python, TypeScript, and whatever else the job needs. Deep AWS and Terraform. Hands-on across architecture, development, infrastructure, and the long tail of optimisation afterwards.

Some writing

• Enable Record Aggregation in the Kinesis Firehose Agent. One configuration flag that can halve a Firehose bill.
• Protect Terraform State Files with an S3 Bucket Policy. Your state file holds your secrets. Treat it that way.
• Multiple Environments with Terraform. Splitting development from production without duplicating everything.
• Log Levels. What each level actually means, and why most codebases get it wrong.

More on the blog.

Getting in touch

Open to interesting problems. Reach me at [email protected]. Based in Tokyo, working remote worldwide for over a decade. Code is on GitHub, work history is on LinkedIn.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Yogi Berra