Originally from suburban New Jersey and residing in the Atlanta area since 2012, I’m a proud geek and love what I do for work. I’ve had many job titles over the years; I started as a part-time software developer in college, worked for a while as a system administrator, and then found my strongest passion in tooling/automation development and developer productivity. In the current market I’d probably describe myself as somewhere between a full-stack developer and a tooling/automation developer. I’m currently immersed in all things AWS, reliability, security, continuous integration/delivery, and developer enablement; right now, this is mainly focused on providing shared services and common tooling, patterns and documentation for a large and growing AWS infrastructure. In the past my major focuses have included large-scale Puppet configuration management deployments and redesigns, monitoring (metrics, logs, and some big Nagios/Icinga installs), web application development, wireless network architecture and deployment, and datacenter operations.
I’m currently employed by Cox Automotive/Manheim as a Principal Software Developer on their Release Engineering Tooling team, a wonderful group of brilliant, passionate, innovative engineers. The majority of my - and the team’s - work is focused on developer productivity and enabling fast, secure, reliable application deployment in AWS. I’ve been involved in a wide variety of projects from assisting teams with application deployment and monitoring to architecting our Hashicorp Vault implementation and integrating it with applications and infrastructure. Jenkins is also one of our main products, and I’ve done quite a bit of work on the Jenkins-as-a-service product we offer to internal development teams.
I’m passionate about doing things right, especially when that comes to the non-functional requirements that all too often get ignored, such as monitoring (ubiquitous observability), reliability (resilience and designing for failure) and security. I’ve never really understood the gap between ops and dev, and consider myself to mostly be a developer who automates what were traditionally ops tasks. I’m a Free Software fan and advocate, though in my work all I ask is for an honest and unbiased comparison of all options, and to consider giving back to the community. I’m a complete data geek and collect metrics on everything I can, whether it’s the apps I’m running in production or the health of my car’s engine.
Outside of work and my personal software projects, my main passions are cooking (generally Chinese, Thai, Cajun/Creole, Mexican and Tex-Mex, but pizza is my latest endeavor), hiking, camping, and spending time with my dogs and cats (two of each, all rescues). I also love traveling though I haven’t done much lately (one of my long-time dreams is to spend a few years traveling the US and Canada in an RV) and occasionally try to reignite my passion for photography (I spent a short time in college as a fine art photo major). When I was living in New Jersey, I was a volunteer EMT for seven years with a 501(c)(3) non-profit town ambulance provider.