About
Still in the code
I'm Gavrie Philipson, a software architecture advisor. Before this I built the systems people now call me about: the test platform behind IBM's XIV storage array, cluster internals at Redis, streaming payment data at Sunbit, and genomics pipelines at Ultima. Mostly distributed, mostly performance-critical, in Rust, Go, Python and C.
The teams I work with now have one decision in front of them that is worth getting right. I work on production systems every week, with the same coding agents your engineers are using, which is what keeps the advice specific enough to act on.
LinkedIn The stories, company by companyHow I work
An architecture argument is rarely a disagreement about facts. Each group reasons correctly from the constraints in front of it, and the cost lands in how those constraints combine, which is the part nobody inside a single group is positioned to judge.
That is also the honest answer to why you would bring an outsider in when your own engineers are strong. They know their part of the system far better than I will after three weeks. What is hard from inside is holding another group’s constraints as firmly as the ones you are accountable for, and I arrive with nothing of my own to defend.
A recommendation written that way is one both groups can check against what they already know.
Speaking
I have spoken at RedisConf in San Francisco and at developer meetups closer to home.
If you are putting a conference or a meetup together and the work above suits your audience, I would be glad to hear from you.
Want to talk it through?
Let's talk