About

I’m a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer at Temporal.

Designing for people is what first drew me into architecture and my BCE in Structural Engineering. I wanted to shape human experience and improve the lives of people existing in a given program. That love for systems led me to backend 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 trying to get better about getting my thoughts out on paper in a public setting regularly. You can sign up for my newsletter if you’d like to send encouragement on this. Here are a few pieces I’ve written over the years.

I grew up in Minnesota, lived in Seattle for a few years, and now live in 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. You can reach me on the bird site at @byelanie.