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. Sometimes the highest-leverage engineering call is recognizing the right tool, standing it up cleanly, and keeping it running.

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 was integrating large language models into production software before it became the center of every conference talk. The bar I hold it to is simple: if it doesn't save someone time, reduce costs, or run more efficiently, it doesn't ship.

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

My Endeavors

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 something in the ad stack broke. (Swift Communications is also where SwiftSend and Swift Auth get their names — same company, later chapter.) That's where I learned how a publishing business actually makes money, and it still shapes how I think about the systems I build.

Getting a campaign live meant a relay of humans: a sales rep would send a creative, an account specialist would forward it to ad-ops, a designer would check it against spec, and if it failed, that rejection worked its way back through the same three inboxes — sitting in a help desk queue, then an inbox, then finally reaching the customer, sometimes hours later. The customer heard the same "this doesn't meet spec" they would have heard instantly; they just heard it after half a day of email relay. I built a tool that let account specialists check a creative against spec themselves, on the spot, and skip the queue entirely when it passed.

The harder part wasn't the code — it was that our designers didn't want it to exist. If a machine could catch spec violations instantly, the human rejection step they owned had less reason to be a person's job, and they said so directly: they wanted the pushback to keep coming from a human, on the phone or in an email, spec-check or not. I built and shipped it anyway, because the current version of "a human checks it" wasn't protecting anyone — it was just adding hours of latency between the same rejection and the same customer. That was the first time I chose to automate a piece of the business over the objection of the people whose job it touched, rather than just making my own part of it faster.

Asking for the job I hadn't done yet

In 2019 the Digital Development Manager left for another role and tapped me, personally, to take over. I wasn't the obvious pick — I'd built one tool that worked, not a platform, and I'd never managed anyone. So I made the case myself, directly to our IT Director: "I want to build things that can only be accomplished with the help of a team." He gave me the role on the strength of that tool and that sentence. Everything that follows is what I did with the job once I had it.

Cloud architecture, and eventually, the whole platform

I grew into the job I'd asked for: a self-built registration platform rebuilt on modern cloud infrastructure, a 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. 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 — just aimed at bigger systems now, with a team instead of just myself.