About Me
I started my career in operations, originally intending on becoming a sysadmin, but I couldn’t keep away the itch to code that I’ve had since I was ten, so I moved into development. I very rapidly realized that these two disciplines didn’t need to be separate – and in fact, shouldn’t be. Since then I’ve dedicated myself to blending system administration and development to create a tasty peanut butter cup of agility and business value through automation, continuous improvement and mentorship.
- Mentorship 90%
- Development 80%
- Automation 99%
- System Administration 70%
- Business Happiness 90%
How About Some Specifics?
Cloud
AWS is my area of expertise. I have production experience with nearly all AWS services. Creating scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure that is simple to work with is an obsession of mine. I attend re:Invent most years, and have my Certified Solutions Architect – Associate designation.
Leadership
I’ve been a long time advocate for best practices and helping other developers to implement them. I’ve brought teams from a purely manual testing world to a full Continuous Delivery pipeline through mentorship and guided experimentation.
System Administration
I like to play in Ubuntu and CoreOS, and have experience in production with Amazon Linux and Windows Server 2008. vim is my editor of choice. I prefer the command line to GUIs any day of the week.
Development
I started off in the .NET world, but have been moving away in the past few years onto open-source platforms. I enjoy web front-end development with AngularJS and scripting with Python. I solve back-end problems with Go. Polyglot solutions where each language capitalizes on its strengths are my ideal working environment.
Configuration Management
I Salt, Consul, Vagrant, and Packer. I’ve been exposed to Chef, Puppet, and Ansible as well. Infrastructure as code is a personal mantra. Good configuration management is the chocolate shell on the peanut butter cup: bland without the development peanut butter, but intrinsic to keeping it from leaking everywhere and making a mess.
Automation
“Automate or die” is my motto. If I can make something happen in one button click, I will. No developer should have to think about how to deploy their app, it should just happen, so they can get back to doing what they love. Automation is the difference between a peanut butter cup that comes out of the wrapper clean, and one that leaves behind a chocolatey mess.
Learning
A day where I don’t learn something is a waste of a day, in my opinion. I’m always on the lookout for new methods, new technology, and new ideas. Continuous improvement takes you from normal-sized peanut butter cups to those king-sized ones. Way better. Mmm.
Driving Change
When it’s best for the business, you won’t see me being shy about introducing change in a controller manner. I drive ideas forward with clearly communicated strategies and backup plans, including detailed analyses of all available options. My passion for delivering business value keeps projects from stagnating.
Analytics and Monitoring
I enjoy enabling lean build-measure-learn cycles via analytics and creating self-healing systems via monitoring. DataDog, Loggly and Keen.IO are my specialties, but I’ve worked with others. Quantitative metrics make me happy.