Grammar, On My Terms

I learn from the mistakes of people who took my advice 🤣 §

My name is Derrick Wippler, I’m a Developer, Mentor, Friend, Father, Husband, Entrepreneur, Gamer, and Builder.

Things I’ve Written §

• Anatomy Of A Product: How to build and scale a SaaS
• Mastering RESTful Design: A Decade of Lessons Learned and Best Practices
• Mailgun/GroupCache: The superior Golang cache
• Introduction to Gubernator
• Service Mesh & Vulcand at Mailgun

Things I’ve Built §

• Gubernator is a high performance rate limiting service and library written in golang and battle tested at Mailgun
• Mailgun.com is a highly scalable email SaaS company which scales to billions of emails delivered each day.
• GroupCache Fork A modified version of group cache with support for context.Context, go modules, and explicit key removal and expiration.
• Hubble is a CLI tool for managing environment variables for other CLI tools like novaclient and kubectl
• Git-clip is a CLI tool used in conjunction with git to manage git branches, by “clipping” old branches and providing visibility into the state of you local branches at a glance.
• SuperRetro 16 is a SNES emulator I wrote with a good friend and tried to form a company around.

Things I Believe §

• You can have strong opinions but, don’t hold them too close to your heart.
• You should never guess, always inspect, measure, and then act.
• If your entire focus is on code, you will get beautiful code, but a poor product.
• Everyone has value, some just haven’t seen it yet, It’s our job to help them see it.
• If you don’t have a strategy for handling technical debt you are doomed to lose velocity over the life of your product.
• The key isn’t finding the perfect product, so much as it is figuring out the method for making successful products.
• The point of a debate is to argue a position, the point of a conversation is to exchange ideas. One is productive, the other is not. Life is too short to argue with those who only wish to debate, but not educate.
• Two much power concentrated in a single person is detrimental to humanity.
• My favorite childhood memory is my back not hurting.

And finally, Don’t take any one thing to seriously, including this.

Things I’ve Worked On §

I’m currently working on an open source based communication startup which is currently in stealth mode.

I helped lead the engineering department at mailgun.com, and previously worked at Rackspace where I helped launch and operate the Cloud Block Storage product. See About Me page for details.