About

Hey there 👋 I'm Max!

I've been writing code professionally since 2012 and tinkering with computers since sometime in the 90s. Right now I'm a Staff Engineer on the API Platform team at GitLab, solving interesting problems at huge scale across our REST and GraphQL APIs.

But the code is just one part of the job, and an increasingly small one. I'm the person always asking "why?", narrowing scope, focusing minds, and making sure we build exactly what needs building and nothing more. I care just as much about mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and championing all-remote work as I do about the knotty technical stuff.

Over 13 years I've worked with organisations of every shape: two-person social media startups, a tiny archive project on the northernmost tip of the UK, multinational humanitarian charities, and now GitLab as a Staff IC. That variety has taken me through heritage, the arts, philanthropy, health tech, and big tech, each one teaching me something different about how software fits into the real world.

GitLab in particular has been transformative. Since joining in 2020 I've watched the company grow from $100m to $1bn ARR, entirely remotely, and I've had a front-row seat for all the technical and organisational challenges that come with that kind of growth.

I'll turn my hand to any technical challenge, but my deepest expertise is in Ruby and Rails (13 years and counting), PostgreSQL at scale (including serving as a database maintainer across hundreds of engineers), open-source maintainership, and ClickHouse.

Away from the keyboard I'm treasurer and trustee of Friends of Cotteridge Park, where we run free activities and build community in Birmingham's best park. I'm a school governor at Cotteridge Primary focusing on IT, a former boarder at Guide Dogs, and a piano player of increasingly semi-reasonable ability.