Frank Robert Anderson

I build and lead engineering teams that ship. Over 20 years across different platforms, leading engineers, and developing systems.

References & Portfolio supplied upon request.

Case studies

org

One engineer per project was the ceiling. Using tooling and process to clear bottlenecks.

1 → 12 engineers per release

Situation: One project, one engineer. Having two people work together required a great deal of coordination and communication.
Decision: Switch to git and adopt GitLab. Start using a development workflow with merge requests and timed releases. We ignore vanilla scrum and gitflow in favor of semantic git.
Result: Two engineers on a release used to be a struggle; five became routine, and over twelve during crunch periods. Any project could take any number of engineers at any time, and a release no longer waited for the one person with the expertise to be free.

scaling

Using AWS serverless to build a COPPA-compliant save-and-share feature that has run for ten years.

20M objects · 10 years · 100% uptime

Situation: Our client wanted a way to save and share the current state of the application.
Decision: I chose AWS serverless for the application and S3 for storage, deployed through AWS SAM — which was new at the time.
Result: Prototyped in 2016, launched in 2017, and still running mostly the code I wrote then. Seven contributors across five releases, most of them maintenance or language-compatibility updates. Ten years at 100% uptime. The monthly bill is S3 storage and bandwidth on more than 20 million objects and roughly a terabyte. For a well-architected system at a certain scale, serverless is unbelievable.