Brett Wines

Hi! :) I’m Brett (he/him), a senior staff engineer at Quip/Slack, where I’ve been since autumn 2016. I’m an infrastructure generalist and my current area of focus is database scaling, but I do my best to balance that with working to address any pain points our engineering community may face as we grow. My core values at work are acting on feedback, fostering an inclusive environment, and treating my coworkers with kindness.

I’ve lived in California since 2007 and spend most of my spare time in the Sierra Nevada, climbing and shooting photos.

Quip / Slack

Technical contributions

• Infrastructure Team
  • MySQL load balancing
  • MySQL connection locks
  • MySQL / Redis resiliency
  • service discovery
  • loadshedding
  • application performance
• Quip EKM (Enterprise Key Management) TL 2018—2021
  • introduced data serialization layer
  • introduced customer data definition + tracking
  • the system is fault-tolerant and supports hundreds of thousands of en/decryptions per second with minimal end-user latency increase
• Oncall Rotation TL 2021—2022
• Real-time update syncing for Canvas
  • co-designed a new system for delivering deltas
  • optimized the delta delivery path to p50=34ms, p99=170ms

Cultural contributions

• was picked to help update Slack’s engineering expectations
• co-led a multi-year community undertaking to distribute responsibility of maintaining production health
  • introduced ownership labels to code (server paths, services, asynchronous jobs, etc.)
  • redesigned our oncall rotation
  • built production health dashboards for every area
  • led workshops on and wrote documentation for production monitoring
• led an effort to remove noninclusive terminology from our code
• helped introduce “Things I Did documents” to increase IC agency in the people review process, in response to community feedback

Climbing

• alpine:
  • Evolution Traverse, first half (14h)
  • Temple Crag, Dark Star (15h c2c)
  • Temple Crag, Sun Ribbon arête (13h c2c)
  • Tuolomne Alpine Triple Crown: North Peak, NW ridge -> Mt. Conness, N ridge -> Mt. Conness, W ridge (<14h c2c)
  • Tuolomne Triple Crown: Tenaya Peak -> Matthes Crest -> Cathedral Peak (<14h c2c)
  • Mt. Russell: Mithril Dihedral -> Fishhook Arête -> East Ridge (15h camp2camp)
  • Incredible Hulk, Astrohulk
  • Incredible Hulk, The Polish Route
  • Lone Pine Peak, N ridge
  • Merriam Peak, Direct N buttress
  • Incredible Hulk, Yggdrasil
  • Clyde Minaret, SE face
  • North Palisade, U-notch
  • Mt. Whitney, E buttress
• Yosemite:
  • Liberty Cap, Scarface (Free)
  • Washington Column, Astroman
  • Lost Arrow Spire, Lost Arrow Spire Direct
  • Washington Column, The Prow
  • The Rostrum, North face
  • Sentinel Rock, Steck-Salathé
  • Clouds Rest, My Favorite Things
  • North Dome, Crest Jewel (via Royal Arches)
• gym: V9, 5.13b/c

Other

• symbol-navigation-hydra, an Emacs package for code navigation
• lifting: 250lbs low-bar squat
• cycling: Old La Honda 32:15
• I like to spend evenings playing piano. I’m currently playing Schubert’s fantasie in f and Bach’s partita 2 in c. Some of my favorite pieces from the past are the Chopin e minor concerto (first movt.), Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” sonata, and the Mozart d minor concerto.
• Titling: Fun in the Library

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