I’m Ken Haines — an engineering leader and systems builder based in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve spent the last 25-plus years designing, modernizing, and operating internet-scale systems, and I still get genuinely excited about making complex things work simply.
What I do
By day, I’m a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft, leading teams that build commerce and finance platform services. The work spans architecture, people leadership, and reliability — migrating legacy runtimes to Kubernetes, modernizing services into cloud-native architectures, and making sure financial systems stay correct when the pressure is highest. I’ve led teams through high-stakes production transitions, incident response, and the kind of moments where getting it right really matters.
How I got here
My first tech job was as a network administrator for an ISP and satellite communication network in the central Canadian Arctic. I spent my days installing satellite dishes, maintaining internet infrastructure for remote northern communities, and learning what “own it end-to-end” really means when the nearest replacement part is a charter flight away. If you want to develop a reliability-focused mindset early in your career, I recommend supporting critical infrastructure where the failure mode is “an entire town loses internet.”
From there I moved to DeepMetrix, a small company building commercial web analytics systems, where I got my first taste of building software products — designing, shipping, operating, and getting paged when things broke. DeepMetrix was eventually acquired by Microsoft, which is how I ended up in Redmond for the first time.
That first Microsoft stint spanned about a decade. Early on I worked on MSN Core Services, building the next-generation rendering framework for msn.com on ASP.NET MVC, and contributed to WebGrease, a web optimization toolkit that shipped as a default add-on in Visual Studio 2012 and later.
The work I’m most proud of from that era was Application Insights. I was one of the founding team members of what’s now a major Azure observability product. I led the data collection team building a high-scale ingestion service designed to handle the firehose of telemetry from web and mobile applications, and I architected and built the original JavaScript SDK — the thing that actually collects telemetry from web applications. I also created an open-source AngularJS SDK for it. That foundation in observability, telemetry pipelines, and system correctness still informs everything I build today.
From there I moved to Electronic Arts as Director of Technology in the Office of the CTO. I built the cloud engineering team from scratch — recruiting the engineers, then leading them through the work of moving live game infrastructure from traditional on-prem to cloud-first architectures. We built a Kubernetes-based hosting fabric for game server deployment, designed a horizontally scaling metrics telemetry platform handling millions of time series from globally deployed servers, and stood up a centralized logging platform for sources spread across the world. Our services supported AAA titles across Battlefield, FIFA, Madden, NHL, Star Wars, Need for Speed, and Plants vs. Zombies. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to run game servers at global scale while keeping latency low and costs reasonable, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about exactly that.
After returning to Microsoft, I joined the Commercial Software Engineering group, working with external partners on complex cloud architecture challenges. From there I moved to the Azure Gaming team, where I worked directly with Epic Games on Pixel Streaming. That arc — from satellite dishes in the Arctic to analytics infrastructure to game services to commerce platforms — is how I ended up doing what I do today.
What I care about
I care about well-designed systems, and I think good design starts with simplicity. After enough years in this industry, I’ve become convinced that complexity is the enemy of reliability — the best systems are the ones where each component is simple enough that someone can understand it, debug it, and change it without fear. Maintainability, observability, scalability — they all follow from that. If the pieces are simple, the system can grow. If they’re not, you’re just accumulating debt with better marketing.
That philosophy shows up as specific opinions I hold pretty strongly: docs-as-code (if the docs aren’t version-controlled, they’re already out of date), infrastructure-as-code (if it can’t be reproduced from a repo, it doesn’t exist), observability (if you can’t see what your system is doing, you can’t trust it), and building software that respects the people who have to maintain it at 2 AM.
I also care a lot about growing engineers. Some of my most satisfying work has been coaching senior engineers into technical leaders — helping them develop the judgment to make architectural trade-offs, own incident response, and represent their teams in rooms where the decisions get made.
What I build outside of work
My technical roots are in C# and .NET, but these days I also write Go. I maintain a handful of open-source projects. BlogFlow is the Go blog engine that powers this site — a single binary that turns a folder of Markdown files into a blog with zero-to-minimal configuration. logfmt.net is a structured logging library for .NET that focuses on performance (~110ns per log call) and simplicity. I’ve also spent time in the open-source observability and Kubernetes worlds, including work on Cortex (multi-tenant Prometheus) and Thundernetes (game servers on Kubernetes).
I’ve been getting increasingly interested in AI-assisted development — not as a replacement for thinking, but as a tool that changes how we approach problems. I think a lot about what it means to treat AI-enabled systems as production systems from day one, with the same expectations around data quality, observability, and security that we’d apply to anything else. I have opinions about where it works well and where it falls flat, and I’ll probably write about that here.
Away from the keyboard
When I’m not building software, I’m usually in my game room restoring and playing pinball machines. My collection spans from 1970s electromechanical tables to modern Stern machines like Deadpool — I’m as drawn to the playfield mechanics and backglass art as I am to the circuits underneath. It turns out the kind of person who enjoys debugging distributed systems also enjoys tracing a broken wire through a 50-year-old relay board.
This blog
This is where I write about all of the above: technical deep-dives, project updates, things I’ve learned, and occasionally things I’ve gotten wrong. If any of that sounds useful, I hope you’ll stick around.
You can find more details about what I’m working on over on the Projects page.