Pastadiablo

Productions

A picture of Dan Magnusson

Who is pastadiablo anyway?

Hi there. It’s me. I’m pastadiablo. I’m also Dan Magnusson. I’ve been both for a long time, though the latter about 13 years longer than the former.

I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to try and keep a conversational tone here. If you’re more interested in hearing a more professional and corporate description, well, you can download my Resume in that link up to the right. The one that’s a download icon. The leftmost one. There you go!

As far as software development goes, I’ve been at it a while. I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2011, so I’ve been at this for well over a decade now!

My first stint was at a place called SRRN Games, a cool startup that spawned from a number of minds at the Darden business school at UVA. I was with them, and their spin-off company Evenspring, a consulting firm that kept the lights on so we could occasionally work on games, for about 4 years before Evenspring sold and SRRN Games stopped well, doing things.

In the sale I was acqui-hired by the Timmons Group, a civil engineering firm that Evenspring had done a bunch of work for throughout the years. I worked there as a mobile developer for a couple of years, doing “mobile enterprise application development” (a mouthful, I know). Though, sometimes I did other things that weren’t enterprise, or mobile, or…applications. The world of Geographic Information Systems consulting was certainly a strange one in the mid-naughts. My work often didn’t even include actual GIS technology, although I believe that was the core of their business at the time.

After that, I briefly worked as a freelance consultant for the Timmons Group before moving on to being a Software Development Engineer II at Amazon. I started out on the Prime Now team, doing native iOS development work. When the call came down from above to switch Prime Now over to React Native so it could be fully integrated into the Amazon app, rather than being its own separate app, I started to look elsewhere in the company.

Listen. I have opinions about React Native, ok? They’re strong, they are not unique, and you probably don’t really want to hear them. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t interested, and I prefer to have SOME interest in my work, you know?

Anyway, I switched over to the Last Mile team and spent basically 4 glorious years there, becoming a master of the art of the “Last 100 Yards” of the Amazon delivery process. My team worked on one sub-set of one workflow of the one app that Last Mile drivers used to deliver packages for Amazon. But that’s massive corporate work for you! Hyper-specialization and fragmentation of orgs into more and bigger orgs and teams. Still though, the scale of what we were building was massive. The iOS version of the app was getting used by something like 1 million drivers a day! It was wild!

Unfortunately, Last Mile as an org had something of a manager turn-over problem. While I was there I had 10 different managers in that 4 year period. After the tenth said he was leaving, I decided it was time to try something new. Something different. So I reached out to an old SDM contact of mine in AWS and tried that out for about a year. It was very different, very challenging, and well, honestly, not my cup of tea. The work was ok, but it was basically focused on Operating Systems and Networking - my two least favorite sub-disciplines. I was attracted to the team by the people, not the work. But because the entire year I was there we were working from home…I really wasn’t getting much time working with the people at all. We were all very silo’d in our own projects.

In June 2023 I was impacted by the many layoffs the industry faced that year. Since then I’ve been working hard at recovering from my burnout, and re-kindling my love for software engineering, architecture, and game development. It took a few months of being convinced I wanted to actually open a pizza restaurant before I could even look at code again. But look I did, and boy, it was good to enjoy it once more. I started working on my game Curator, which I’m sure I’ll mention in some blog post or another at some point, if I haven’t already.

During my years at SRRN and Evenspring I worked with lots of tech and lots of systems. I made many games and prototypes in Unity, worked on a website with AngularJS, developed (you guessed it) native iPhone apps, setup and administered our bug-tracking and continuous deployment pipelines, and even wrote a photoshop plug-in script…thing….once. For batching images. It was a strange time. This was my Breadth period, in which I became exposed to much of the technology that exists and gained a passing understanding of all of it.

While at Amazon I almost solely focused on high-flying, massive scale, intense-pace native iOS development. Navigating internal CI/CD and package management tools were the other main skills I picked up, but those don’t really 100% cross apply. This was my depth period, where I became highly specailized in native iOS development, and came to love the Swift language with a fiery passion. I’m still watching all of the Serverside Swift and Swift on Windows github projects with a keen interest.

If you are less interested in the past, and more interested in the present, you can contact me at any of the links up near my face. You can also check out some of my most recent blog posts, or trawl through the projects and read little articles about things I’ve worked on. Although, full disclosure, I haven’t written many blog posts as of the writing of this “About” page, so, I’m really hoping by the time you read this I’ve gotten some stuff up there.

~Dan