About Me
I am a tool user seeking the golden path, father, athlete, volunteer in my community, and focus on a healthy life-work balance. I am looking for new projects and partnerships to solve problems. My passionate for simplifying IT and open source has led me to seek out more ways to broaden my own skills. As part of this transition, I also began making furniture, home built-ins, bespoke carpentry projects, and taking commissions.
Moving from managing a multitude of people, projects, sales, and knowledge into a role where I could focus on one thing at a time has been a monumental shift. After binging on stress for years, left without the constant stream of unplanned emergencies me ill equipped to self manage. Getting back to my roots I have been able to find the pragmatism required to manage in the face of unbounded scope and ever decreasing resources.
IT Career
I cut my teeth at IBM working in the fast paced workload of ClearQuest. This C++ aplication sparred no expense, single threaded server, wrapped in the hopes and dreams of the JVM on Linux to save the day with the jni. I got to write tons of Perl, VbScript, run Linux, Solaris, HPUX, AIX. I did actually try and get a postiion with a much more technical team that supported developer debugging with compilers but I lacked the depth in C and C++ and they passed my name along downhill to the ClearQuest team who oddly enough always seemed to need somebody. Since I was already on an OS X mac and had experience using Linux and the terminal for years at this point, that made me one of the most senior Unix people on day 1. Combined with a complete lack of experience and expectation from what a job with customer support would mean, I was ready to commute 2+ hours every day for as long as it took to finally move out of my parents house.
Well, support is a soul crushing profession. It chews up the people pleasers and numbs everybody else. Every client has the same urgency to solve every stupid problem with this system. I closed thousands of tickets, I clearcut the dead wood and they see me as a agile lead too. I hated the speed they closed defects so I started learning to debug Java/JNI/CPP applications, which made me a developer all the sudden. I could reproduce a problem and try and fix it with code, that was where I wanted to be.
The core practices of Site Reliability Engineering has been a big part of my career. This includes the creation and maintence of practices and tool implementations, as well as the consumer of shared observability platform across hetergeanous runtimes. In my tenure at my last position I had the opportunity to work as an indivdual contributor doing the primary devops focused work on a few tools, to the operator, designer, implementor of these systems for projects. The work was challenging and the project were often interesting but it began to feel more and more like a body shop. It was time to move on.
Education
Attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study Physics and ended up receiveing a Bacelor’s Degree in Computer Science. Once I actually started my classes I found programming and Computer Science much more interesting.