I’m Richard Crowley. I manage secure, reliable, and compliant Internet‑scale systems.

I work on the best cloud database, PlanetScale, built on the best production RDBMS, MySQL. I also ride and wrench on bicycles.

I led operations engineering at Slack from 2014 through 2020, through 100x growth in employees and 1,000x growth in connected users. I founded Source & Binary and developed Substrate in 2020 to put everything I knew about using AWS at the highest level for most risk-averse customers into practice for startups. Before all of that I cut my teeth at Square, OpenDNS, and Flickr.

Drop me a line at rcrowley@rcrowley.org.

Selected writings

• SOC 2 compliance for startups and first‑timers
• The Rails/Django parable
• You should have lots of AWS accounts
• Almost six years at Slack
• Disasterpiece Theater
• DevStructure Redux
• Things UNIX can do atomically

The rest of my writing about software architecture, AWS, Go, Linux, and a long, long tail of other topics, dating back to 2007, is in the index.

Elsewhere

GitHub · LinkedIn · Pinboard · Twitter