I’m Russell Bloxwich, a full-stack engineer with 6+ years of professional experience. I started in a startup at university, and I’ve been building products ever since.
From early-stage products to complex enterprise platforms, I’ve worked across frontend engineering, distributed systems, architecture, and the decisions that keep a team moving.
Frontend engineering for a complex, local-first data-transformation platform, working across teams on product direction, architecture, and performance.
Owned the frontend side of the Firestore-to-PostgreSQL migration, using dual writes, feature-flagged reads, and Server-Sent Events. The cutover had no customer-visible incident.
Worked on React performance for enterprise customer workspaces, tracing rendering problems back through subscriptions and the data layer.
Built a two-day ANTLR SQL parser POC that ran 3–20× faster on real customer SQL. The production team retained its architecture, stack, and test corpus.
Co-authored the design document behind a cross-functional initiative exploring CLI and file-based AI integration, with VP Engineering and CTO/CPO involvement.
Platform engineering across eventing, authentication, and global control-plane services, with code ownership and subject-matter expertise in eventing.
Supported the new eventing system and built internal code-generation tools and libraries using ts-morph, string literal templates, Protobuf, and Kafka.
Optimised Kafka infrastructure costs and worked with the team to build an external global control-plane management API.
Implemented the global authentication plane with the team, using Auth0 and OAuth2. Services ran on AWS with Postgres in RDS.
Owned code quality and served as a subject-matter expert for eventing across the platform.
Full-stack product development across event-driven AWS services, real-time internal tools, and the team’s delivery workflow.
Designed and developed Karere’s message-driven architecture with AWS SNS as the broker, alongside SQS, Lambda, API Gateway, and the Serverless Framework. QLDB supported event sourcing and DynamoDB provided storage.
Built internal React and TypeScript tools that communicated with the backend primarily through WebSockets, with Epsagon for observability.
Acted as sprint master in the team’s adapted Scrum workflow, with systems-management responsibilities and Azure DevOps for repositories and pipelines.
Returned from March to May 2021 to help with the existing technology and build an internal tool using React, TypeScript, MongoDB, and a serverless backend.
I like the early part of product work: figuring out what to build, choosing an architecture, and bringing the work together across a team. I’m comfortable working through an existing system too. The useful question is usually what will make it easier to ship the next thing.
TypeScript and React are my home territory, with experience across Node.js, Postgres, AWS, and event-driven systems. I write about the decisions behind the code, from frontend architecture to software that keeps your data yours.
Earlier independent work included co-founding Fathomiser, a family venture for remotely monitoring water tanks. I worked on the software connecting cellular sensor readings to a dashboard, mobile interfaces and alerts.
Outside paid engineering, I’ve helped run the Terrible Ideas Hackathon, built a crowd-controlled bartender, and learned some expensive lessons in homelab storage. I cook, make games, and miss having an electronics workshop. Not every idea needs to stay on a screen.
Graduate Diploma in Computer Science, Auckland University of Technology.
The building doesn’t stop there.
EnoughMail, EnoughRepos, Gratin, Webscav, games, and plenty of experiments.
