> Hello. I'm Lanie.

Designing for people is what first drew me into architecture and my BCE in Structural Engineering. I am fundamentally interested in shaping human experience in the context of a given program. That love for human-oriented systems led me to teach myself programming while applying to Master’s programs. I fell in love with software engineering and eventually distributed systems, where I found satisfaction not in controlling them but in learning “to dance with them,” as Dr. Donella Meadows wrote in Thinking in Systems.

I’m currently a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer working on delivering 4 9’s of reliability at Temporal.

Here are a few pieces I’ve written over the years, one of which made it to the front page of Hacker News: marathon (2023), midwest developer (2021), what I learned about interviewing (2021), what among us teaches us about byzantine failure (2020), goplay shortcode (2020), parsing a form pitfalls (2020). I also have a newsletter you can sign up for. Let me know if you have any ideas on what to do with all these door photos I keep taking door photos

I grew up in Minnesota, hiked many miles while living in Seattle for a few years, and now have found my way to San Francisco.

When I’m not in front of a computer, you can find me looking at moss in the mountains with my dog, Stella, working through the stack of books that somehow never shrinks, training for my next marathon, or throwing mud at the pottery studio.