Hi. I'm Mark Burch.
Passionate and driven engineering manager with a background in backend systems. I still code regularly and have spent the last 15+ years contributing to various large-scale commercial products, primarily using JVM tech stacks. I also contribute to a few large open-source Java projects such as Apache Kafka, Debezium and a few OpenAPI projects.
Career
I started with firmware development in C/C++ for SanDisk back in 2013. I worked on a few important modules, most notably the ones managing NAND flash cell health degradation due to both cycling and ambient temperature. In addition, we developed an in-house full-stack Java app to aggregate and analyse experiment logs. An example of a SanDisk product that ships with such firmware is the industrial-grade eMMC embedded flash drive. If you've ever trusted a phone, a camera or a car with your data, you've run firmware I helped write.
I then joined Atlassian as an individual contributor to work on what was then (and probably still is) the world's most widely used collaboration software — Confluence. The team worked on several high-profile resilience and availability features like rate limiting, likely facilitating a better night's sleep for your Confluence Data Center admin.
Within a few years I transitioned into a management role to lead one of the Open DevOps teams. The team operated on a YBIYRI ("You Build It, You Run It") basis — pager included. We owned several microservices and UI pieces within Atlassian's cloud offering.
Next up: Engineering lead at the MongoDB Sydney branch, which seems to surprise a lot of people who aren't aware of MongoDB's Australian presence. Fun fact: the storage engine that powers the database was homegrown in Sydney all the way back in 2010. No Sydney, no MongoDB.
Our team of intrepid developers, designers and product managers worked on a set of tools, most notably Relational Migrator, designed to help companies retire their creaking SQL estates built around older databases like Db2, Sybase and Oracle in favour of something more modern. This was also the first time I enjoyed some press coverage.
Now, in a modern David vs. Goliath story and back in a hands-on role, I am working on displacing an industry giant.