I build and advise on systems that need to be understandable, reliable, and useful under pressure.
My work sits between product thinking, systems design, and execution. I'm most useful when a team is dealing with complexity that's already affecting trust, speed, or delivery quality.
Systems Architect, Consultant, and Product Builder
14+ years across product systems and platform engineering
years building products, automation, and platforms
clear ways to work with me: hire, consult, or reserve time
experience across leadership, architecture, and hands-on delivery
The work has consistently moved across product, platforms & automation.
Leading a platform that turns large volumes of public information into usable intelligence for operators and decision-makers.
Built automation and orchestration systems for high-volume workflows, runtime control, and operational feedback.
Worked across transaction flows, wallet infrastructure, and product architecture in blockchain-heavy systems.
Explored automation, scraping, and orchestration patterns that later informed product and platform work.
A lot of the value comes from live working sessions — not just polished deliverables after the fact.
The best work happens when product context, technical judgment, and decision-making are in the same conversation: whiteboard sessions, architecture reviews, or pressure-testing a roadmap with the people who need to ship it.
Direct, collaborative, and grounded in the real constraint instead of abstract technical theater.
A clearer decision, a stronger system plan, or a faster path to a useful next step.
Some architecture jokes deserve to stay in the archive.
This Silicon Valley frame sits here as a small culture reference for the kind of technical chaos that makes whiteboard work both funny and useful. A good session is more disciplined than this — but the joke lands because every serious system has one impossible-looking diagram somewhere.
Drop public/silicon-valley-whiteboard.jpg and it appears here automatically.
Systems over tools
Automation over repetition
Evidence over opinion
Scale as a first-class constraint
Clarity over cleverness
Delivery over theater
Contribution history, down to the day, directly from GitHub.
This section is currently showing demo contribution activity so the About page can ship before the live GitHub token is configured.
8,583
Across 4 tracked years for @Menwitz.
Demo contribution data with the same calendar shape as the live GitHub integration.
Last built Aug 18, 2026.
1,337 contributions in 2026
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2,388 contributions in 2025
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2,412 contributions in 2024
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2,446 contributions in 2023
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Where I explain the tradeoffs behind the systems work.
RAG Chunking Strategy: How to Split Documents So Retrieval Works
Chunking decides what your retriever can find. Here's how I split real documents — structure-first boundaries, parent-child units, and how to prove it worked.
Why Is My RAG Retrieval Bad? A Diagnostic Order of Operations
Bad RAG retrieval is four or five distinct failures wearing one costume. Here's how I localize which one you have before changing anything.
Retry with Exponential Backoff and Jitter (and the Retry Budget Nobody Sets)
Exponential backoff caps how fast a client retries; jitter stops every client retrying together. Here's the retry logic I actually ship, and the two limits most teams miss.
Reranking in RAG: How a Cross-Encoder Fixes Retrieval Quality
A cross-encoder reranker re-scores your top candidates by reading query and document together. Here's how I add one, size it, and prove it worked.