Susan Potter is a fractional-CTO and principal software engineer

My philosophy centers around empowering teams to confidently push changes to production, even on their most challenging days, by cultivating a state of Flow, autonomy, and agency across the entire engineering organization.

For early-stage startups striving to productionize their MVP and fuel growth, I offer a battle-tested approach that streamlines workflows, builds resilient systems, and fosters a culture of continuous learning and developer empowerment. With my guidance, your engineering team will unlock their full potential, delivering superior software and infrastructure with unparalleled efficiency.

• Accelerated Delivery: I can lead and help streamline your engineering organization's processes and delivery pipelines that can more easily induce states of Flow, which will allow your team to seamlessly iterate and adapt to changing market demands with less effort.
• Resilient Architecture: I have designed and implement robust systems and pipelines that can withstand the rigors of growth, minimizing downtime and ensuring a seamless user experience and I am happy to leverage that experience to guide your engineering organization in this endeavor.
• Skill Development: Leverage my hands-on mentoring and strategic leadership capabilities to level up your team's expertise and capabilities in distributed systems and functional programming at scale. I focus on fostering an environment of continuous learning and professional growth that can continue after I depart.
• Cost Optimization: I can cut your future maintenance costs through proven architectural patterns and design principles, which will maximize the ROI of your engineering investments going forward.
• Developer Empowerment: I prioritize enhancing autonomy and agency across the engineering organization by establishing delivery pipelines that promote well-defined [team] ownership, trust, and a sense of mastery over the codebase and infrastructure.

As a polyglot programmer, I bring extensive experience with languages and paradigms that promote scalability, reliability, and maintainability, including:

• Functional Programming: Haskell, PureScript, Scala, and TypeScript leveraging functional concepts, increasingly since 2011
• Object-Oriented Programming: Ruby (including Rails), Python, Java, and C++ (1996-2019)
• Other: Erlang/OTP (2009-2012)

While embracing the power of pure functional programming in well-typed languages, I also excel in minimizing scalability and reliability issues in Ruby and Python stacks through proven architectural patterns.

With 14 years of experience leading public cloud initiatives, including AWS multi-region and multi-cloud strategies, I possess a deep understanding of building and optimizing cloud-native architectures. My expertise in congruent configuration management (e.g., NixOS) and declarative infrastructure empowers teams to maintain consistency, reliability, and autonomy at scale.

I specialize in working with early-stage startups seeking to transform their engineering organizations for rapid, sustainable growth as a fractional-CTO or a temporary principal engineer. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, and let's explore how my fractional CTO services can propel your business to new heights by unlocking your team's full potential through a state of Flow, autonomy, and agency.