Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?
I develop and bring to market new technology solutions to help organizations deliver and secure their applications and APIs. This work ultimately brings a better digital world to life because applications and APIs are the building blocks of today’s digital experiences (e.g., the app you use to order and pay for coffee, how you connect remotely to your healthcare team, your banking app or website), and the number of them in the world is rapidly increasing.
My days are spent meeting with current and potential customers and partners to understand their challenges and opportunities, researching market trends, and working with my product management, architects, and engineering teams to design and deliver solutions to address those challenges and opportunities.
For example, most organizations today are challenged to protect their apps and APIs from cyberattacks. This objective is difficult both because threat actors are increasingly equipped with better automation and AI-based technologies, as well as the fact that the number of different app architectures and hosting locations that organizations must defend in today’s hybrid- and multi-cloud world is also increasing. To help those organizations, we’ve developed a portfolio of solutions that secure, deliver, and optimize any app, any API, anywhere. And because our customers are navigating a significant and growing gap in available cybersecurity talent, looking ahead, we’re working on making the job of securing apps and APIs ridiculously easy.
What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?
One of the most compelling (and urgent) projects I’ve been working on is F5’s Distributed Cloud API Security offering. Because APIs enable communication and data sharing between different software, they have become central to how companies create value for themselves and their customers.
As an example, the ability to check your credit score or transfer money all within your banking app is because of APIs connecting multiple service providers. This is wonderfully convenient and creates a rich experience for customers, but it has inherent risks for the company and individuals if all parties involved are not securing their APIs, which is sadly the case more often than not. This is concerning because unprotected APIs provide direct access to valuable assets, such as individuals’ personal identification information or enterprises’ data, which is why APIs have become cybercriminals’ new favorite weapon.
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To demonstrate the magnitude of the situation and how prevalent APIs have become, F5’s office of the CTO estimates that the average enterprise uses 15 million APIs, and that by 2030, there could be 500 million to more than a billion APIs in production.
What technologies are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?
I’m most optimistic about technologies to address climate concerns, specifically clean energy, carbon capture, and water desalinization developments. I’m optimistic because I have to be. These advancements are essential for us to avoid some of the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
I’m least optimistic about the metaverse. At best, it’s a means for individuals to escape or avoid the realities of the world we live in. At worst, it’s a digital facsimile and sometimes even an amplifier of a lot of the intractable issues we have in reality, including biases and security risks.
What’s the best tech-related media you read/watch/listen to?
I enjoy the overview of trends published annually from industry thought leaders with broad perspectives across industries and technologies, such as Mary Meeker or Benedict Evans. Reading those and some of the longer-term prospects put out by strategy consulting firms, such as McKinsey or Deloitte, helps with looking around corners and going deep into what ifs.
What’s something about you we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?
I’m a voracious consumer of science fiction. My favorite novel is A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?
What current events suggest about the trajectory of human civilization and where the systemic unlocks might be to alter that trajectory.