About

I’m Travis. I live in San Francisco with my partner and our dog. If you’re curious why I built this site, I wrote a bit about that here.

Interests #

Sailing #

I grew up sailing on Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, starting when I was 4 years old. Since 2019 I’ve been racing the Port Huron to Mackinac Race with my family and some friends on my dad’s boat. It’s one of the longest freshwater sailboat races in the world, up to 290 nautical miles across Lake Huron from Port Huron to Mackinac Island. The race has been running since 1925 and can draw over 200 boats each year. It’s a multi-day endurance event, and there’s really nothing else like it.

Photography #

I’ve always been attracted photography and find the art of taking a visually interesting picture fun. I’m not particularly good at it, but I enjoy the process, and having this site gives me an excuse to actually go out and shoot more. I currently am shooting with a Cannon R5 when I shoot digital and a Cannon A-1 when I shoot film. You can see some of my photos in the photos section if you’re interested.

Other Stuff #

When I’m not sailing, taking photos, or working, I’m usually playing video games, working on personal code projects, or working through the endless list of things that need attention in a 120-year-old house.

Work #

I’m currently a Platform Engineer at Gridmatic in the Bay Area. The tl;dr is I build and run distributed systems, right now that means operational infrastructure for grid-scale battery systems that help keep the electrical grid stable.

I’ve spent most of my career working on platform and infrastructure stuff: Kubernetes, microservices, developer tooling, keeping production systems running. I like building things that make other engineers’ lives easier.

Career #

Gridmatic (2024–Present) Platform infrastructure for grid-scale energy systems. Go, Kubernetes, BigTable.

Apple (2020–2024) iCloud infrastructure. Worked on a device authentication service handling 10k+ req/sec for over a billion devices. Led migrations from Mesos to Kubernetes for iMessage services.

Confluent (2017–2020) First SRE hire for Confluent Cloud. Built the control plane that managed 1200+ Kubernetes clusters across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Helped grow the team from 5 to 50+ engineers.

LinkedIn (2012–2014) Ran 1000+ node Hadoop clusters processing 20+ PB of data.

Download my resume if you want the full details.