I started in tech in 2005 with my first help desk position on a large Navy contract. I knew I was good with computers, and that guided my most of my career. If I was given an opportunity, I was going to do well. I never thought of tech as this vast world of opportunity. For the majority of my career, it was an opportunity to survive.
From 2005-2016 my experience revolved around DoD contracts and on premises Microsoft enterprise environments. It was the "market" if you will in the Hampton Roads, VA area that I grew up. My wife was looking to pursue her PhD path, so we opted to move to the West Coast and experience something different. This led me to a job with Jet.com, an e-commerce start up that was purchased by Walmart in that same year. I remained with Jet, building and supporting infrastructure across the US and also in Dublin, Ireland until 2019 when I moved to the gloabl email team at Walmart. I began missing the newer technology, constant learning, and pace of work tha came with working for Jet.
After some reflection in 2020, I decided to pursue a path of becoming a software engineer. This is a path I am still actively pursuing and hope to eventually apply my previous experiences in infrastructure and operations to a software engineering role in the future.
My day to day working responsibilities include supporting distributed applications deployed on traditional infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2 instances, as well as applications deployed on Kubernetes. I spend a lot of time improving processes and configurations in the ways that we deploy applications, infrastructure, and how we support them and other teams. We deploy and support big data technologies such as Apache spark and Hadoop, RDMS such as PostgreSQL, and containerized solutions running on Docker and Kubernetes. We manage our deployments via configuration management and automation technologies such Ansible, Terraform, and trusty bash scripts.
I'm currently spending my free time learning Golang as well as data structures and algorithms with Python. I'm spending time learning about Project Sigstore and making use of Tekton to tie my software projects and software security together with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD). I hope to become and regular contributor to the Sigstore project, and potentially other open-source projects as well.
I have created a personal project called healthy-seed to apply my learnings with Golang and demonstrate my abilities along the way.
I'm always interested in learning and progressively getting better every day. I'm lucky to have a supportive family and professional team that affords me this opportunity. I think the best way to learn is through an exchange of knowledge.