I have worked for fortune 500 companies, startups, and mid-sized corporations. I bring experience, passion, and know-how to the table. I help businesses bring their products and services to market faster through process automation and organizational changes such as implementing CI/CD pipelines and architectural updates to automate deployments for faster and more thorough releases. My passion for breaking down the barriers, building and improving processes, so that the engineering, testing, operations, and business teams work better and smarter is only second to my diligence to adhere to best practices, transparency between all levels of business and cross-departmental understanding.
DevOps aids in strategic IT goals:
I started my career in server operations supporting a large infrastructure including thousands of servers (mostly physical ones back then) and that quickly evolved into learning to code. This allowed us to support that large of an environment without a large army of sysadmins. I coded the process to collect large amounts of data including: WMI, event logs, disk space, anti-virus versions etc and then created executive dashboards giving a holistic view of the environment and with the ability to drill down so the responsible groups could effect changes that were needed. I then buried myself in software development, making web applications for unemployment services, financial applications surrounding the mortgage process, enrollment and quoting engines for health insurance. I started leading development teams and began organization changes to use agile practices. This allowed my teams to quickly add small and large features allowing us to meet the customer demands and keep a competitive advantage to other title search organizations.
Here is a brief overview at my current client. I am responsible for defining and managing the Release Engineering and Devops capabilities for the division. This includes building a devops team from the ground up, managing a large number of servers, along with the configuration and maintenance of multiple testing and production environments. I direct the team that creates the the full tool chain automation and we successfully deploy large number of applications into production every week for the past year. I coordinate and collaborate with the App Dev, Quality Assurance, Operations, Marketing, Compliance and other business units to deliver features to our customers. My latest project is designing and driving the adoption of a cloud solutions with our continuous delivery systems.
DevOps is all about effective communication and collaboration. I’ve been able to deal with production issues from the development and operations sides, effectively straddling the two worlds. I’m less interested in finding blame or playing the hero than I am with ensuring that all of the moving parts come together. Using DevOps methodologies and principles found from: Agile, LEAN, and hard experience. I like to come into an organization and using the OODA loop by John Boyd.
I focus on Microsoft’s stack but also have serious dabbling in JAVA, IOS (Swift, objective-c), Python, Groovy, MongoDB, MSSQL, Oracle, Azure DocumentDB. Here are some of the tools in the workshop
Want help transforming your organization from waterfall to Agile? Drop me a line about your project if you’re interested in working with me.