Resume

"As smart as developers are, they are not always good at explaining things in a way that makes human sense. not you. you are an exception. you are A+"

-- Product Support at BuzzFeed.

I ❤️ this feedback. It came from someone I was mentoring. She was interested in getting a better understanding of how to design and architect software systems, and also how to know what types of questions she should ask when investigating technical incidents.

Her feedback also hints at something bigger which I strive for: to help others to do their best work and to push/promote the good work other engineers do (including those from either a diverse background or minority).

I just read https://www.integralist.co.uk/posts/fastly-varnish/ and it’s amazing

-- CTO at Fastly.

I mean... come on, what more could you ask for 😂

"Hi Mark, your name keeps coming up (in a good way 😉) and I wanted to put a face to a name. Folks on the team like working with you. You're responsive and provide good and timely feedback."

-- Engineering Manager at Fastly.

I always aim to build meaningful relationships with the people I work with across an organisation. In doing so I hope to ensure that we are able to work as a cohesive unit, and provide great value to our users. But ultimately I like to be helpful (it makes me feel good), so this was a nice bit of unexpected feedback ❤️

"Thanks, I'm amazed that you always deliver top notch answers."

-- Senior Sales Engineer at Fastly.

Funnily enough I actually _didn't_ have the answer they needed. I wanted to redirect this person to where I thought would be the best place for them to get a solution (so it included as much historical context, and as many signposts, as I could provide).

A kind smile, a compassionate ear, and a bit of effort goes a long way in life.

"Hey Man… you are a true powerhouse in fixing issues and handling customers… i’m truly impressed by you! Thanks and keep it up!"

-- Senior Sales Engineer at Fastly.

I genuinely care about getting customers unstuck, so it's always lovely when someone notices the extra effort.

Hey Mark, thanks again for releasing the 4.0.0 version, last week! The customer already provided positive feedback. It's a pleasure to work in such a smooth way! 🙇

-- Senior Solutions Architect at Fastly.

In this case my colleague was unfamiliar with writing Go and he was trying to contribute to a couple of different code bases that I was the core maintainer of, and for which I was helping guide him through and supporting/educating him on the various technical aspects of. It was a small change but one I really appreciated him taking the time to dig in and help implement.

Thank you for your output and all the information you've provided. We really appreciate it. We have applied your latest release on all our production environments and it's looking great and there are no unexpected diffs in our Terraform plans anymore. Again, thank you for your time and your help to understand and resolve this issue as your insights were really helpful.

-- Customer

Hey Mark, just wanted to say thanks a lot for helping out with the Terraform issue, really appreciated! 🙂

-- CSE (Customer Support Engineer) at Fastly

We had a strange bug crop up in the Fastly Terraform provider that was causing havoc for customers. I dug into it on behalf of support, tracked down the problem, and ended up spotting a couple of other subtle bugs elsewhere in the pipeline while I was in there.

Nobody enjoys seeing unexpected terraform diffs in production, so I made sure to keep the customer posted with detailed updates while we worked through it. Tricky set of bugs to pin down, but getting their environments stable again was well worth the headache.

I want to call out this great thread in the fastly dev forum and give a huge bravo to @integralist for being there, being responsive, and guiding the customer to the solution. Overall the thread is :chefkiss: because...

- It makes for a great image optimization use case/support-driven tutorial.
- Is a display of how engaged our dev rel team is with the Community.
- Is a display of how smart and kind our users are.
- Uses the Fastly platform tools (like https://fiddle.fastly.dev/) to show our work!

-- Director of Community at Fastly

This was a really nice (and unexpected) compliment. I like to go the extra mile to ensure customers feel seen/heard and that they're supported (even if it means I can't give them an immediate answer and need to refer to another team's expertise first).

I just wanted to say that the care and attention you're putting into this work is making me enjoy my work, and I appreciate you.

-- Developer Relations Engineer at Fastly

I was touched by this feedback as I had been battling a particularly difficult project and this came at a time where I was emotionally and mentally exhausted. Just the pickup I needed 💖

I want to thank @integralist for always answering any questions I (or others) have with so much detail and attention. Your answers usually long and full of thought and for that I am extremely grateful!

-- Tier 3 Customer Support Engineer at Fastly

This was posted in a Fastly #gratitude Slack channel and got lots of nice emoji reactions to go with it 💖

Thank you so much Mark for going above and beyond. I appreciate the details you provided.

later the next day...

Wow, this is amazing work Mark! Thank you so much for this thorough analysis.

-- Senior Customer Support Engineer at Fastly

A customer had reported an issue that we initially were not able to replicate. But after some thorough debugging (through _multiple_ internal systems) I was able to identify, explain, and document the source of the problem, then provide a resolution for the customer.

Man, it’s nice working with you

-- Security Architect at Fastly

This certainly came out of nowhere 🙂. He needed a bunch of information related to some security work I was doing (I was implementing SSO Single Sign-On using an OAuth PKCE flow for Fastly's CLI tool) so I gave it to him whilst also pointing out some oddities about the platform that I felt should be addressed.

I wanted to share feedback from NAME_OF_LARGE_CUSTOMER_IM_NOT_ALLOWED_TO_SHARE to give you positive feedback on our Terraform provider vs COMPETITOR's:

"The team were quite shocked at the difference between COMPETITOR's Terraform approach and Fastly....Fastly was a lot simpler, and just as powerful. Express my gratitude to the team for making the Terraform provider so awesome!"

-- Senior Principal Sales Engineer at Fastly

It’s all @Integralist 😅

-- TLS Manager at Fastly

THIS 🔼

-- Sr. Principal Engineer, Core Systems

Piling on here with ANOTHER_LARGE_CUSTOMER giving kudos to the TF provider. 🙂

-- Cloud Engineering Manager

I'm very grateful for this feedback, both from the customer and from my colleagues as I had been working really hard on improving the Terraform provider and up until that point hadn't felt that any one had noticed or cared, and so this helped boost my confidence in what I had been doing. 💛

This level of investigation deserves a medal @integralist. Thank you so much for your time and deduction!

-- Cloud Engineer at Fastly.

A question was raised, which wasn't relevant to the channel it was brought up in but I didn't want this person to go away without the appropriate support. So as well as redirecting them to the correct channel and explaining why I was redirecting them, I then proceeded to explain the steps/processes I follow when trying to figure out the thing they were asking about. This led to a long thread of details and links to code and documentation. As much as I could provide as a helpful send off.

Your code review is itself a work of art! Is there a hall of fame for code reviews.

-- Staff Product Manager at Fastly.

I take a lot of care in my PR reviews 😊.

Look… that was f***ing impressive. 👏
Thank you so much!

-- Director of Developer Experience at Fastly.

A customer was having issues with one of our tools when using Windows. Fastly pulled out all the stops to get me the access I needed to investigate and debug the issue properly and I was able to get a fix in place in a few hours, helping the customer realise what an asset Fastly is to their workflow.

You demonstrate, year in and year out, an excellent capacity to learn new systems and languages, pick up the responsibility of managing and being responsible for parts of our stack and technology and it looks like you work smoothly and effortlessly with our colleagues both in person / zoom and in slack / Jira / pull requests. Thank you also for your regular, consistent contributions and easy-going working demeanor. This is the sort of collegial professionalism and competence that makes Fastly a great place to work.

Principal Engineer in Edge Networking at Fastly.

This particular person was leaving Fastly (to retire) and I reached out to wish them all the best and to let them know what an honour it had been for me to get just a small bit of experience working with them. This was their response to me, totally unexpected last piece of kindness shared by this wonderful individual.

I'm sharing a Very, Very Big Shout-Out to @integralist for his work on the Eng side of the Domainr + Fastly systems integration efforts!

DETAILS I CANT SHARE

This huge milestone will make operating and maintaining the Domainr service much more straightforward for the Domain Services Eng team going forward.

Thank you, Mark!

-- Staff Product Manager in Network Services at Fastly.

I also want to add that @integralist has done an amazing job on both documentation and tooling improvements for on-call.

As a member of the domain services team that is now responsible for handling on call and being onboarded to domainr codebase and systems, it has been a huge help in orienting myself.

He has also been super helpful in knowledge sharing with active pairing and helping out with presentations too!

We appreciate you Mark!

-- Staff Software Engineer in Network Management at Fastly.

Always nice to get some recognition from your peers for the hard work you put in and the care you have for the projects you work on.

Mark this is great! Immaculate, even. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, 10/10 no notes. This is the Sistine Chapel of refactorings (seriously)

-- Staff Product Manager (Network Services)

Yep, this is #eng-wins–worthy and I want to shout it from the rooftops.

-- Sr. Principal Engineer

Love this!

-- Sr. Engineering Manager

I created a design document for how to improve the structure and tooling around secrets managements, especially related to certain applications the Domain Services team are responsible for. After much back and forth discussion I went ahead and started to implement a POC of my suggested approach, and I recorded a video to demonstrate the features and the design, all with the hope to gauge feedback and tweak as necessary, and the response was a lot better than I expected 😍

I wanted to take a moment to recognize Mark's recent help with a GitHub workflow implementation. I've been trying to teach myself some things about more complex GitHub interactions and this was on my list of goals for Q1 2025. Mark took the time to test an approach in his private repository to ensure things would work. What really made the difference was how he helped me understand how to adapt the workflow to my specific needs. His willingness to both gently mentor and troubleshoot, especially while busy and in an entirely different time zone than me made this successful. And he cheered me on to boot. I'm genuinely grateful for his support. This kind of collaborative knowledge-sharing makes our company stronger.

Senior Manager, Technical Documentation | Product Growth at Fastly

This was given as Workday feedback and it was really nice they took the time to do this. Not much more to say, other than I always like to ensure people feel supported.

The amount of things I've learned from `@integralist` 's blog posts is incredible. Thank you so much! `:salute:`. Your blog is legitimately a gold mine in terms of information. Thank you for taking the time to write all of those posts, I learn something every time I look at them.

Senior Software Engineer, Domain Services at Fastly

The team had been discussing how to profile Go programs and I had written a blog post covering all the details years back that I thought would be useful to the team (who were new to Go). I'm always genuinely pleased to hear that my blog is useful to people.

Hey Mark, I am sailing into retirement next week and I wanted to pop in and say goodbye and thanks. I learned a lot from you and your written words. Whenever we got to work together I could always count on you providing feedback with grace and patience. Thanks for making Fastly a better place

Staff Engineer (formerly Engineering Manager) Logging Team at Fastly

I was genuinely touched that this person reached out before they took off for a well deserved retirement. It meant the world to me to know that I had made a positive impact on them and their time working with me.

Thank you again for the ai run through, so cool to see the different ways it can be used ! Also you should definitely give a tech talk on this or something, not to be dramatic but my mind is blown , it was really cool thanks again!

Associate Software Engineer - Domain Services Team at Fastly

I spent a couple of hours with a new member of the team, guiding her around the various pitfalls of using AI, showing her the custom Skills I've built, and explaining my planning and coding workflows. I made sure to cover the key components for being successful with AI (such as context management), and was very pleased to discover she found it so useful and engaging.

Ohhhhh….this is why we pay you the big bucks!

Sr. Engineering Manager - Domain Services Team at Fastly

A bit of a joke, obviously, but I'll take it 😅 We ran into a slight snag where offboarding a user with admin rights broke our internal notifications. I managed to sort it out with a fairly simple tweak so everyone keeps getting alerts without any bother.

oh man, I'm going to miss you on domain services :sadblob:

Senior Software Engineer - Domain Services Team at Fastly

A colleague I had built up a great relationship with was sad to see me move to a new team to focus on some critical company AI-related work. I reassured him I wouldn't be far away 🙂

Thank you so much for helping bring this together and making that one of the smoothest meetings I've been a part of!

Sr. Engineering Manager - Domain Services Team at Fastly

I was the designated tech lead for a multi-team initiative. I had to present our architecture design (over 6 months worth of work and collaboration and discussions...with some tension thrown in) to the CTO and SVP of Engineering. It was stressful to say the least 😅 but I pushed through, and with some last minute tweaks managed (with the help of some very smart and compassionate colleagues) to get the architecture approved 🎉

Massive thank you to whoever was in charge of getting path-based routing out the door. It's making our VCL to Compute migration so much easier!

Customer of Fastly

This was shared with me by my line manager after the feedback bubbled up through various channels. I spent months designing, building, testing, and collaborating across multiple teams (which meant getting up to speed on parts of the infrastructure that were new to me). Hearing that it made a customer's migration so much easier was deeply gratifying.