About
My personality has always been ambitious, driven, and goal oriented. As a former athlete, playing both baseball and semi-pro golf, former professional musician, former personal trainer and strength coach, and former music industry professional working in artist management, project management, and data analytics, to currently software engineer, I know the meaning of discipline, but I also know I love learning!
It was during the aforementioned role that I started to teach myself programming, and immediately fell in love with it. So much so, that I went all in and decided to attend a bootcamp called Nashville Software School. My focus there was full-stack, which included Javascript, React, Node.js, Python, and the Django framework. This was a fairly substantial career shift, but one I am happy I made as I get to solve problems everyday, learn everyday, and keep my search for a challenge always satisfied!
I had always had an interest and passion for infrastructure, as well as corelating business objectives to software goals and releases, so with foundations rooted in full-stack development and previous knowledge and interest of the entire development cycle, as well as passion and curiosity for infrastructure, I made the transition to Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Built Technologies . In this role as a SRE, I was eventually able to lead a small SRE team, where my responsibilities could range from optimizing existing infrastructure to supporting removing technical debt and preventing future incidents, tracking core metrics and solving bottlenecks proactively, building/ improving tools and features that refine or enhance sustainability, monitoring, and logging; as well as resolving incidents within internal SLAs, and defining internal SLOs. As part of the SRE initiatives, I implemented quality gate checks for deployments across our many different environments.
Fast Forwarding to current day, presently I am working as a Staff DevOps Engineer in systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure where myself and my team manage a highly complex, large scale enterprise ecosystem comprised of 5,000 to 10,000 machines on average, many times much more, and over 35 Kubernetes Clusters. From cloud infrastructure, to MLOps and data movement, to more cutting edge technology like Service Mesh, API Gateways, and Edge Computing, myself and my team strive to make tools that are simple, secure, scalable, reliable, and pleasurable to use. For more information about this role, see my LinkedIn page.
Stepping into a leadership role as Lead DevOps Engineer and now currently Staff DevOps Engineer, I assume responsibility not only for myself but also my team. I believe a team is only as good as its leader, and the leader must own everything in his or her world. For me, this means enabling the team for success, consistently working towards building a better and more effective team, and ownership in driving projects corresponding to business objectives consistently and effectively to completion.
Volunteer Work
PyTennessee 2020
PyTn is hosted at Nashville School of Law and is is a yearly regional Python conference that is a developer-focused Python conference with talk topics running the gamut between beginner and advanced, and from web development to data science and machine learning. I was responsible for possibly the most important part of the conference--giving the speakers the help they needed and keeping the conference moving smoothly. I participated in helping in set-up, tear down, checking guests in, and moving items as necessary.
Music City Code 2019
The Music City Tech conference is held at Nossi College of Art in Nashville, TN and is a conference that caters to developers and touches on all aspects of software and website development. The Conference is focused on quality over quantity, with three sub-conferences: Music City Code, Music City Agile, and Music City Data. As a volunteer, I was responsible for set-up before the conference and checking guests in, as well as catering to the speakers, making sure they had what they needed for their talks, getting them set up for their talks, as well as any duty necessary to make sure the conference ran as smoothly as possible.
DevOpsDays 2021
Worked closely with community chair to to recruit speakers, volunteers, and visitors for the conference.