A little bit about me.

Who am I?

I am Reece Arratoonian-Walker and I am a senior software engineer. I enjoy all aspects of software engineering. From development to operations, I am driven to understand every layer of the systems that I work with in order to deliver and support reliable, performant software. Alongside engineering, I enjoy producing electronic music, cooking and climbing. Summarised: I love to learn!

History

I started my career with full stack JavaScript before moving onto Scala and Java with a shift to backend engineering (my home). That shift marked the start of my love for designing, building and operating distributed systems on a massive scale.

Since that shift I’ve enjoyed building Thrift-based web services, decomposing legacy monoliths, designing a RabbitMQ-to-Kafka migration, leading the build-out and deployment of an API gateway, rolling out standards for a huge microservice migration - just to name a few important milestones.

My career so far has taught me to embrace the unknown and now I can thrive when there’s a lack of clarity. Taking high-level problems and solving them with intelligent, efficient and simple solutions is what drives me.

My current focus

Understanding the layer below in everything I do is very important to me. This has taken me from developing applications in high-level frameworks to lower-level systems programming, from using managed services to operating a homelab with some old datacenter equipment. Alongside my day job as a senior software engineer, I am currently focused on expanding my knowledge of networks (things like BGP, eBPF and VXLAN) and systems programming with Rust.