Dan Farrelly

Dan Farrelly is co-founder and chief technology officer of Inngest, whose developer platform runs event-driven workflows, background jobs and AI agents, retrying failed steps so engineers do not have to build their own queues. He co-founded the company in 2021 with Tony Holdstock-Brown, and Inngest released its first product in 2022.

Switching From Construction to Code

Farrelly started out in civil engineering and worked in construction management before teaching himself web development, according to a Buffer post welcoming him to that company. He worked at Slated, a startup that connected independent filmmakers with investors, then joined Buffer, the social media scheduling company, as a front-end engineer after moving from New York City to San Antonio, Texas.

Becoming CTO at Buffer

He worked his way from front-end and full-stack engineering through infrastructure and DevOps to become Buffer's chief technology officer. He also created MailDev, an open-source tool for testing email during development that has more than 6,000 stars on GitHub, and he still maintains it more than a decade later, he writes on his site.

Starting Inngest With Tony Holdstock-Brown

At Inngest, Farrelly has led product, technical and growth work. Talking with Kent C. Dodds before a conference talk, he said coming back to hands-on building after Buffer had been very fulfilling. "I kind of forgot how much I missed being hands on," he said. He added that he wanted to keep the team lean: "I'd like to stay small as much as we can." He now writes about agent architecture and does some fractional advising work.

Personal Life

Farrelly lives in Detroit, Michigan. He is restoring a craftsman bungalow more than 100 years old, from its windows and electrical work to its wood doors and trim. He mentors his nephew's robotics team and likes biking, hiking and camping.