Building Tooling for Engineering Teams

From Sherpa at Zappos to Webflow HUD, I've spent my career building tools that make other builders faster. Here's how I approach it.

2 minute read

Zapier's application for an Applied AI Engineer asked:

Have you built tooling or platforms used by other engineering teams? Describe one example and how you worked across teams.

I love building tools for people, so I thought "this should be written down!"

I Love Building Tools For Builders

Yes. I've spent most of my career building for builders.

My first real taste of this came at Zappos, where I built Sherpa, a tool that collapsed the "dev machine setup to first PR" timeline from 1-2 weeks down to half a day.

That's when I fell in love with building for builders.

At Walmart, I was on the team that built the Electrode framework (a React component library) and stood up CI/CD infrastructure managing over 450 Jenkins jobs.

I eventually joined the Edge Foundation team at Walmart, where I contributed to building the proxy and CD and later went to work with all of the Walmart DevOps teams to lead workshops, teach and consult on the Lua-based CDN/proxy configuration system to deploy powerful custom configurations.

At Webflow, I joined the core web team to provide the Webflow engine implementation for all product teams.

I fell into improving our CI/CD process and started a team in Systems and Infrastructure called "Build and Health", where we worked on CI/CD, the testing infrastructure and later co-built a tool called Webflow HUD. HUD (as far as I know, the still use today) was for engineers to work with the multi-service system locally. I also started a project to decouple the monolith into entrypoints, giving dev teams a smaller blast radius when shipping bugs to prod.

At Murmur, I built Plumb internally so engineering and non-engineering teams could build Supermanage with a common language. Eventually, Plumb became the product itself.

Philosophy

I love building for builders. Whether it's internal tooling or platforms like Plumb (which let non-engineers contribute to engineering functions), my best work happens when I'm amplifying other people's velocity.

I Love Building Tools For Builders

Yes. I've spent most of my career building for builders.

My first real taste of this came at Zappos, where I built Sherpa, a tool that collapsed the "dev machine setup to first PR" timeline from 1-2 weeks down to half a day.

That's when I fell in love with building for builders.

At Walmart, I was on the team that built the Electrode framework (a React component library) and stood up CI/CD infrastructure managing over 450 Jenkins jobs.

At Webflow, I joined the core web team to provide the Webflow engine implementation for all product teams.

At Murmur, I built Plumb internally so engineering and non-engineering teams could build Supermanage with a common language. Eventually, Plumb became the product itself.