Software Engineer, 2019 — 2021
Halbrook Media
Making a national newsroom fast, and keeping it fast.
- Role
- Software Engineer
- Period
- 2019 — 2021
- The place
- Digital media · national news publisher · ~300 employees
At Halbrook I worked on the platform behind a national news site, where performance is editorial infrastructure — a slow page during a breaking story is a lost reader. I led the move to edge rendering and, just as importantly, built the discipline that stopped speed from silently eroding afterward.
What I did there
Moved rendering to the edge
Led Coldstart, migrating page rendering to Cloudflare Workers with tag-based cache invalidation, bringing worldwide p95 load time to 600 ms and cutting infrastructure cost by 38%.
Introduced performance budgets
Built Gauge, the load-testing harness that made a perf budget a required CI check, so regressions were caught at merge time instead of by readers.
Earned the newsroom's trust in the cache
Designed the precise, instant purge model that let editors publish corrections without fighting the caching layer — the human problem behind the technical one.
What it changed
- Worldwide p95 load time
- 600 ms
- Infrastructure cost
- −38%
- Perf regressions in 14 months
- 0