Susan Potter: fractional-CTO and software engineer

My philosophy centers around empowering teams to confidently push changes to production, even on their most challenging days, by cultivating a state of Flow, autonomy, and agency across the entire engineering organization.

For early-stage startups striving to productionize their MVP and fuel growth, I offer a battle-tested approach that streamlines workflows, builds resilient systems, and fosters a culture of continuous learning and developer empowerment. With my guidance, your engineering team will unlock their full potential, delivering superior software and infrastructure with unparalleled efficiency.

• Accelerated Delivery: Implement lightweight, bottleneck-busting processes and delivery pipelines that enable a state of Flow, allowing your team to rapidly iterate and adapt to changing market demands.
• Resilient Architecture: Design and implement robust systems and pipelines that can withstand the rigors of growth, minimizing downtime and ensuring a seamless user experience.
• Skill Development: Leverage hands-on mentoring and leadership to level up your team's expertise, fostering an environment of continuous learning and professional growth.
• Cost Optimization: Cut future maintenance costs through proven architectural patterns and design principles, maximizing the ROI of your engineering investments.
• Developer Empowerment: Enhance autonomy and agency across the engineering organization by establishing delivery pipelines that promote ownership, trust, and a sense of mastery over the codebase and infrastructure.

As a polyglot programmer, I bring extensive experience with languages and paradigms that promote scalability, reliability, and maintainability, including:

• Functional Programming: Haskell, PureScript, Scala, and TypeScript (leveraging functional concepts)
• Object-Oriented Programming: Ruby (including Rails), Python, Java, and C++ (1996-2019)

While embracing the power of pure functional programming in well-typed languages, I also excel in minimizing scalability and reliability issues in Ruby and Python stacks through proven architectural patterns.

With 14 years of experience leading public cloud initiatives, including AWS multi-region and multi-cloud strategies, I possess a deep understanding of building and optimizing cloud-native architectures. My expertise in congruent configuration management (e.g., NixOS) and declarative infrastructure empowers teams to maintain consistency, reliability, and autonomy at scale.

Are you an early-stage startup seeking to transform your engineering organization for rapid, sustainable growth? Reach out to me on LinkedIn, and let's explore how my fractional CTO services can propel your business to new heights by unlocking your team's full potential through a state of Flow, autonomy, and agency.