Senior Backend Engineer · Portland, OR
David Merrick
13+ years building microservices in Kotlin and Java, Kafka data pipelines, and distributed systems.
Open to backend service and data engineering roles. Get in touch →
Senior Backend Engineer · Portland, OR
13+ years building microservices in Kotlin and Java, Kafka data pipelines, and distributed systems.
Open to backend service and data engineering roles. Get in touch →
Multi-agent orchestration for my Home Assistant deployment. Gandalf coordinates; Aragorn diagnoses runtime; Sam builds clean Jinja2; Legolas owns dashboards; Galadriel mines usage patterns for new automations.
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111 kWh of whole-home EcoFlow battery backup, hauled back from Idaho in a rainstorm in an F-150 for 35% of normal cost. The federal clean-energy credit covered a large portion of what was left. Named for the moment Obi-Wan says "that's no moon."
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Enterprise-grade Omada gear in a residential build: hub-and-spoke 10G backbone, PPSK with VLAN isolation, Comcast Business + Starlink load-balanced WANs, and a suite of agents managing the whole topology.
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Writing
Rope-a-dope for distributed systems — event-driven patterns that don't just survive autonomous agents, but get stronger under the beating.
How my personal AI went from a flat-file monorepo to a Kafka microservice architecture in my basement.
Five rules for working agentically: plan first, test upfront, manage cognitive overhead, verify continuously, and keep the work human-readable.
A new house, an appliance dragon named Smaug, 200 sensors, and the eighteen-agent Fellowship I built to keep them all under control.
A Pi-powered K8s cluster on HypriotOS.
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Slack-controlled bot that uses Twilio to buzz guests into the building.
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Random-podcast picker — RSS feed plus an iOS shortcut.
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Alexa skill that fetches the latest TriMet bus and train arrivals for Portland.
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