Mike
Ferrari

SwiftSend — Serverless Email Platform

With AWS Pinpoint reaching end-of-support, I directed the from-scratch replacement for an 11-site newspaper network sending roughly 1.5 million emails a year — designed, built, and proven as a drop-in Pinpoint replacement, with the cutover scheduled for next month. I owned the requirements and drove the architecture; an AI coding agent implemented under my direction. The decisions were mine:

• Fire-time assembly over patched timing hacks. I traced chronic stale-newsletter sends to a recurring campaign racing a cron job to overwrite content — a race condition three layers of legacy timing code had been built to paper over. I re-architected around content assembled at fire time with immutable dated sends instead, which makes stale sends structurally impossible and let me delete the workarounds.
• Per-tenant isolation by construction, not by convention. A per-item multi-tenant authorization model was one forgotten condition away from a cross-paper subscriber leak. I chose resource-level IAM isolation — one DynamoDB store per publication — so that bug class can't happen, and each tenant's data stays cleanly portable.
• A two-token paywall with no shared secrets. Swift Auth's access model pairs a send-time HMAC click token with a short-lived Ed25519 grant, verified in-process by the WordPress plugin against a public key. Because it's asymmetric, there's no shared secret sitting on any of the 11 sites for an attacker to steal in the first place — and no network call on the reader's hot path either.
• Cut my own plan when the numbers didn't back it up. I'd planned to cache the suppression store for latency. Once I ran the numbers — seconds and about a cent per send directly, versus forcing every send worker into a VPC — the cache didn't pay for itself, so I dropped it. Owning the tradeoff means reversing it when the data says so.

AWS · SES · Lambda · EventBridge Scheduler · SQS · DynamoDB · Firehose · Athena · TypeScript · AWS CDK

Registration & Identity Platform

Designed and built a registration platform spanning multiple digital publications, growing to more than 100,000 registered users and giving the business a real first-party customer data platform. Built the subscription and paywall systems alongside it — checkout, payment handling, fraud prevention, and institutional access across a network of publications.

AWS Cognito · DynamoDB · Stripe · React · WordPress multisite

Publishing Automation & Cost Optimization

Not every win is code you write. I found, evaluated, and deployed the WordPress-to-InDesign automation that took manual production work out of the editorial workflow — a tool that has eliminated roughly $220,000 in annual software costs for four years running. Recognizing the right tool and standing it up cleanly saved the company real money, without writing a line of new code.

WordPress · Adobe InDesign automation · Print production · Vendor & cost optimization

Internal AI Tools

Built AI-powered newsroom tools — Ask the Editor — that help editors review articles, generate constructive feedback, suggest follow-up stories, summarize documents, process audio, and automate repetitive editorial work. I've been integrating large language models into production software since before most newsrooms were talking about it.

OpenAI · Google · Mistral · Meta · Retrieval-augmented search · Transcription

identithing.com

An AI-centric analysis tool that inventories assets, built for both B2C and B2B2C (with insurance carriers as the near-term market). Launched and live. I build these end to end, which keeps me honest about cost, tradeoffs, and what actually ships.

AI vision & analysis · Asset inventory · B2C / B2B2C · Serverless

A quiet one, still in the workshop

A reading platform built around discovery — because finding your next book shouldn't feel like homework. Not ready to talk about yet. Ask me in an interview.

Recommendation · Discovery · Coming when it's good

Advertising Specialist, Swift Communications

I started in advertising operations at Swift Communications, a newspaper company — running campaigns through Google Ad Manager, coordinating launches across editorial, sales, and operations, and becoming the person people asked when nobody else had the answer.

My first software projects weren't products—they were internal tools that eliminated repetitive work and helped people do their jobs faster. That mindset has shaped every system I've built since.

Asking for the job I hadn't done yet

In 2019, our Digital Development Manager accepted a job at another company. Before he left, he pulled me aside and encouraged me to apply. During my interview with the IT Director, I said, "I want to build things that can only be accomplished with the help of a team." A month later, I was promoted into the role.

Cloud architecture, and eventually, the whole platform

I grew into the job I'd asked for: building a registration platform on modern cloud infrastructure, managing our dev team during our full CMS migration from WordPress to Naviga Writer and back again — the second move when leadership cut the cost — training roughly 200 people through both, and now SwiftSend to replace Pinpoint and keep our 1.5 million newsletter emails flowing. It's the same instinct as that first spec-checker — find where a process is carrying more friction than it needs to, then remove it and automate processes — just aimed at bigger systems now, with a team of agents instead of just myself.