About me

Who am I?

My name is Kyle Schrade. I’m a software engineer at StockX (more on that later) who has a passion for GraphQL, mono repo, physical activity, technology, and interesting problems. I live with my fiancé, Abbey, and cat Sneaker. Abbey named the cat before she knew me, which is hugely ironic with my current job.

What do I do?

I work for a company called StockX, where I’m an engineer on the “Edge” team. Many companies spin up a team like ours when they are trying to break down a monolith. We have morphed over the last year or so from a team watching over the gateway to a team eager to help others contribute to GraphQL at StockX. I created the proof of concept for GraphQL at StockX and have helped quite a few people make additions to our graph. In less than a year, we have gone from 0 rpm to close to 500k rpm, all while keeping an availability of 99.9%.

I’m also the creator of a service called Barricade (hopefully soon to be open sourced), which is a simple, yet incredibly impactful, service that scales applications in Kubernetes. It does this by changing values in a horizontal pod autoscaler (hpa). With the volatility of our traffic at StockX, this has increased our availability by 90%.

Before StockX

Before StockX, I worked a ton of random jobs in construction and athletics. I played college baseball at Mott Community College (more on that later), so I’ve had many doors opened for me that not many get to walk through. But after chasing my dream of playing professional baseball, I started in tech. I got an internship at United Shore (a mortgage company) and then hired full time, all while I was still in college. While at United Shore, I supported a business team, helped with an internal system overhaul, and helped to create internal frameworks. I was offered the job of Associate Architect but ended up turning it down to go to StockX (that’s a discussion for another day). I learned a lot at United Shore and look back at my time fondly because that’s where I learned how to be an engineer.

Before Tech/Other Fun Things About Me

Now the fun personal stuff! Before my time in tech, I was fortunate enough to play baseball in college. It was at a junior college, but I had some fantastic players that I played with and against. In my 2 years there, we had 3 teammates throw 90+ miles per hour, and almost everyone went on to play at another university. In high school, I played with exclusively division 1 and 2 baseball players. Two of my teammates were drafted to MLB teams. Unfortunately, I dislocated my shoulder twice in high school and twice in college, which cut my playing career short. I made the decision to quit baseball after my 2 years at Mott and go to a university to further my education like everyone else. It seemed like the smart thing to do after all the shoulder problems and being on the all-academic team. I transferred to Oakland University and earned my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. During my time at OU, I joined a fraternity (Sigma Pi), went on a ton of ski trips, and, most of all, learned I don’t like the institution of the university. But I found a love for tech and all the things it can do. Some of the pictures I have on my Instagram from snowboarding are awesome! (if you ever want to check them out).