CJ Horton

Software engineer and lifelong generalist.

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whoami

I've been a senior software engineer at HashiCorp since 2019, working on HCP Terraform (formerly known as Terraform Cloud). Before that, I was a software engineer at Revelry. I live in Portland, OR.

My career so far has covered the full stack from frontend to maintaining cloud infrastructure. I find the most satisfaction at work when navigating ambiguous problem spaces with a lot of user value. Sometimes that means product work, aka figuring out how to solve a user problem while managing scope and technical constraints. At other times, that means more platform-oriented work to hunt down performance problems or figure out how to accurately measure and improve reliability.

I do my best work when I can think about my job as something that contributes to others' success. I believe that at its best, software is a force multiplier that increases human capacity.

I tried my hand at a few other things before I found my way to building software: I have a music degree, worked as a dog handler, did ebook and print production, and narrowly escaped becoming a public librarian. Nothing really stuck until I found a job where learning is pretty much constant.

When not at my laptop, I'm usually lifting something heavy, exploring the beautiful Pacific Northwest, reading (scifi and fantasy, the campier the better), or submitting to the whims of my local feline overlord.