Hi, I'm Spencer.

I'm a platform engineer in North Vancouver. I care about the hundred small frictions between code and production — the build that takes too long, the deploy that's manual, the runbook that only lives in someone's head — and I've spent the last several years removing them for product teams.

Right now that's at Wolters Kluwer, where I run delivery and hybrid-cloud operations for a governance, risk and compliance platform. Before that I built a consultancy's internal platform from nothing at Whitecap, and before that I shipped gameplay systems on two mobile games at Night Garden Studios. That last one still shows: I can't build a portfolio site without turning it into a city you fly around.

The best platform work is quiet. You notice it because deploys got faster, incidents got rarer, and the team stopped having the same conversation every Friday. Increasingly the part I enjoy most is the people side of that — writing the standards, aligning engineering with what the business actually needs, and helping other engineers do their best work.

On the side I run Developer Box Inc., which is where client work and my own products live.

Off the clock

I've refereed lacrosse for twenty years, at every level. It's excellent training for incident command: make the call quickly, explain it calmly, and never take the shouting personally. When I'm not on the floor I'm hiking or camping on the North Shore, snowboarding when there's snow, or cooking.