Patrick Shields is a technical leader, weary dad, and enthusiastic but not necessarily skilled musician. He has worked as a software engineer in companies big and small, most recently as the Chief Architect at CircleCI as the company grew from 50 engineers to over 200. His professional interests are distributed systems and functional programming, though lately he thinks even more about communication, framing, and collaboration. On a good day, he tears up a big problem into a pile of smaller ones.