About
I'm Ashton Honnecke, founder of Pixelstub, LLC. I've spent 25 years building software, leading teams, and shipping systems that work.
Background
I'm a software engineer and consultant based in Denver, CO. I started Pixelstub in 2009 and have been building software professionally since 2001. My work spans cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, data pipelines, and technical leadership.
I'm a Linux-first, containers-always engineer. I care about clean code, automated quality gates, and building tools that reduce cognitive load. I've worked across startups and enterprise — from Photobucket's early growth to Panasonic's connected vehicle platform — and I bring the same approach to every engagement: understand the problem, build the simplest thing that works, and automate the rest.
I'm an active open-source contributor, conference speaker, and Emacs user. I hold an MBA and BS in Computer Science from the University of Denver.
Career
Panasonic North America
Lead Cloud Engineer
- Subject matter expert for Python, boto3, containerization, and serverless architecture
- Chaired cross-team best-practices group; mentored engineers on security and code quality
- Built internal tooling: Lambda hot-mounting, SNS inspection, Git/ticket integration
- Identified and decommissioned unused AWS resources, achieving ~30% infrastructure savings
- Drove SonarQube rollout with >50% unit-test coverage gains
- Built near-real-time OBU ingress on Lambda/SQS/SNS with horizontal scale
Digital Assets Data
Sr. Software Engineer / Blockchain Tech Lead
- Built Python microservices for on-chain data extraction from cloud-hosted ETH/BTC nodes
- Ingestion pipelines processing 100 GB nightly on S3/CloudWatch/Lambda/ECS
- Fan-out CI with CircleCI for parallel PR testing; standardized unit testing practices
- Implemented TOTP MFA and hardened containerized node infrastructure
Havenly
Senior Software Engineer
- Designed horizontally scalable queued-ingest system: 7M+ rows/day from 25+ sources
- Built decoupled pipelines with faceted fuzzy search
Colorado State University Global Campus
Systems Architect
- Led architecture and SDLC improvements
- Subject matter expert for Linux, PHP, SQL, data modeling, and pentesting
Photobucket
Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer
- Owned payments integration (PayPal, credit card processing) and internal tooling
- Introduced CI and unit testing; mentored engineers
- Created model code-generation system and led MVC framework migration
Education
Master of Business Administration
University of Denver · 2004 – 2005
Emphasis: Accounting
Bachelor of Computer Science
University of Denver · 2000 – 2004
Minors: Mathematics, Philosophy
Speaking
Cleaning Up Your Python Environment
PyColorado
The Value of Linting
PyDEN
Open Source
- Consolo — Hot-mount Lambda filesystems locally
- Snifter — CLI SNS topic inspection
- Jolly Brancher — Git/JIRA branch automation