I've been shipping production software since 2006. These days I do it for myself — and for a small number of teams who need a senior hand.

I'm Philip Damra, a full-stack and AWS engineer based in the Phoenix area. I run Sweet Cat Software, where I design, build, and operate a portfolio of serverless SaaS products — and take on a handful of project-based engagements for other teams each year.

My work tends to live in the same place: event-driven backends, GraphQL APIs, and the AWS infrastructure underneath them. I lean on domain-driven design to model the business in code, and on tools like Step Functions, EventBridge, message queues, and event sourcing to keep complex workflows honest. I've architected systems that process exam registrations under peak load for the College Board, orchestrated FHIR-to-EHR patient data pipelines in healthcare, and rebuilt automotive inventory platforms around infrastructure as code.

How I like to work

I care about software you can own. That means readable infrastructure as code, deployments you can run from your own laptop, and architectures without black boxes or vendor lock-in you didn't choose. I write tests, I document the seams, and I leave a codebase that the next engineer — or you — can actually reason about.

I work best on well-scoped, project-based engagements: greenfield builds, architecture and AWS modernization, serverless backends, AI features on Bedrock, and the unglamorous reliability work that keeps the lights on. If you're looking for a long-term seat on a scrum team, I'm probably not your person — but if you have a hard problem with a clear shape, that's exactly the kind of thing I take on.

The rest of it

Outside the terminal, I'm usually somewhere near a soldering iron or a stack of books on things that don't compile. I tinker with robotics and local LLM inference, keep an off-grid cabin running on solar in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and believe good software — like most good things — takes a little caffeine and a little magic.