About Me

I was most recently a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Real Kinetic where we help teams with cloud, architecture, scale, performance, and management.

I am a passionate engineering leader that loves to help mentor and build teams. I believe in promoting a customer-centric culture. I promote applying systems thinking with a product mindset to build great solutions and productive engineering organizations. I also focuses on teaching teams on how to scale their systems and organizations. As well as how to work collaboratively to communicate and coordinate effectively within a growing organization.

The majority of my work the past decade has been for SaaS companies and clients. My technical focus has been on service-based architectures running on cloud services (specifically AWS and GCP). On the leadership side, I've focused on good design principles based on systematic thinking. I believe communication skills are critical and an increasing burden is being placed on us as creators to better communicate our systems as they continue to grow in complexity over time. This is the focus of my personal favorite presentation that I've given: What is Happening?: Attempting to Understand Our Systems.

In my spare time, I love to read about many topics. My current favorites have been complex systems, philosophy, neuroscience, sociology, economics, and machine learning/AI. I've also been learning functional programming, specifically Haskell and Purescript.

I also write, speak and record a podcast. If you're interested in having me present at your event please feel free to reach out by any of the methods below. If you'd like to be a guest on our podcast please contact me as well.

Twitter: @lyddonb
LinkedIn: beau-lyddon
Email: lyddonb@gmail.com

Work / Resume

Resume

Work History

  • Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Real Kinetic
    March 2017 - January 2019
  • Senior Director of Architecture @ Workiva
    January 2011 - March 2017 (6 yr, 3 mo)
  • Software Engineer @ Quality Attributes Software
    May 2009 - January 2011 (1 yr, 9 mo)
  • Software Engineer / Architect @ EFCO
    January 2004 - April 2009 (5 yr, 3 mo)
  • Software Developer / Freelancer / Consultant
    January 2000 - January 2009 (9 yr)
For a more detailed work history please reference my LinkedIn Profile (linkedin/beau-lyddon).

Education

ISU
Iowa State University
Bachelor's degree, Management Information Systems, General