Employee Spotlight: Thomas Farvour

Our team at Peregrine is made up of dedicated individuals with deep law enforcement experience and technologists committed to supporting public safety. We will be periodically highlighting what makes Peregrine most special – the people. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Thomas Farvour is a Software and Systems Engineer at Peregrine. Thomas joined the team in early 2022 and has implemented complex network capabilities for our customers at Peregrine. Read on to find out more on these solutions, along with five questions for Thomas.

Can you tell us a bit about your professional background?

Throughout my 16-year career, I’ve worked as a software and systems engineer with a specialization in DevOps infrastructure. In my various roles, my main responsibility has been to enhance and maintain infrastructure to ensure continuous availability of hosting systems and platforms. I have collaborated closely with software engineers to promote infrastructure as code, tooling, and self-service platforms, enabling them to develop, test, and release high-quality code and products. Most recently, I worked as a Staff Infrastructure Engineer at Lumos Labs, prior to joining Peregrine.

What made you want to join Peregrine?

There were a lot of things at Peregrine that checked the top boxes for this next step in my career, but ultimately it came down to the team I met in the interview process. I was impressed! Admittedly, I wasn’t too familiar with the public safety sector, but I saw it as an opportunity to do a few things: Enhance my technical abilities, contribute meaningfully to a unique technology, work with very smart people, and learn more about a new industry that I hadn’t been exposed to.

By joining a high-growth startup like Peregrine and focusing on infrastructure, I am meaningfully contributing to the company’s ability to scale – reliable and scalable systems are my bread and butter – so it was a good match all around.

Thomas traveling the mountainous regions of the West on his RV adventures

Explain a unique technical challenge or problem you’ve worked on during your time at Peregrine.

A challenging and exciting concept I have been involved with is the network connectivity between our customers’ on-premises systems and Peregrine’s systems.

Some background: There are IP addressing limitations which don’t allow one network to talk to another network directly when there’s risk of network collision – which could also result in data loss or transmission errors. This presented a unique challenge to us since customers’ networks used colliding CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) address spaces that overlapped one another and our own. Direct communication between our networks and their networks became impossible over private VPN network links. We worked through this by using an advanced networking concept to achieve these goals.

This enabled unambiguous communication between Peregrine's systems and customer networks. We built a system that obscures real networks on our side and the customers’ side to facilitate communication between the networks without risking data loss or any collisions – while maintaining the robust security and data privacy standards we have. So now, we can effectively talk to customers’ systems without affecting their addressing schemes – which makes the address collision problem much easier to deal with.

In my entire career, this was the first time I’d experienced a serious conflict with IP addresses in this manner. I always knew it was a possibility, but actually working through it was really hard, and really interesting. The novel solution is a testament to our organization – the team banded together to solve this problem.

What motivates you?

The ability to build scalable systems in pursuit of reliable platforms and learning new cutting-edge technologies and techniques. These two ideas usually go hand-in-hand. I’m constantly thinking of better ways to apply what I know towards solving problems both in software and infrastructure engineering. As technologies evolve, so too does the complexity of problems that can arise. The tools that are literally at our fingertips enable us to do our jobs better, smarter, and more efficiently. I really enjoy adapting to the ever-changing technical landscape and learn new things. Peregrine has the environment to explore that, and it helps motivate me.

I'm also motivated by Peregrine's powerful mission to support public safety. Public safety was new to me, but thanks to an amazing team and interfacing with our customers, I learned a lot more about municipal government and law enforcement. Helping organizational efficiency and improving decision-making for institutions that impact communities across the country is rewarding.

Lastly, what superpower would you say you bring to Peregrine?

I have a strong desire and enthusiasm for connecting with people, particularly my teammates. An aspect of my role at Peregrine that has intrigued me is the opportunity to mentor my peers in different areas of engineering. Traditionally, software engineers tend to delegate unfamiliar infrastructure and systems engineering tasks to specialists, and vice versa. However, I strive to bridge that gap and teach them to fish. I enjoy teaching my passionate software engineering teammates about infrastructure and how these systems interact when building scalable systems. By exposing them to different areas, we foster more creative thinking within our engineering team, enabling us to tackle the complexities of our evolving platform. Collaboration is key to our success.