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!
After some success in the Music Business on the artist and creative side, I started my "professional" career in the Music Industry on the business side as a Tour Manager, then Project Manager, and eventually moving to a slightly more technical role in Data Analytic, as an Income Tracking Services Manager. I was later promoted to Income Tracking Analytics and enjoyed being on a leading technical team in the industry at a major label and publisher. As I progressed, I began to teach myself programming in order to write various scripts for ETL, data ingestion and transformation, data analysis, and statistical purposes in Python. I was also wrote scripts to fetch data from various API's, and acted as Project Manager working with developers to build tools for process automation and business forecasting. For more details of this role, please refer to my LinkedIn or Resume.
It was during the aformentioned 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!
Out of NSS, I started my programming career as a full-stack software engineer, where my day to day would range from front end work like creating an entirely new feature, or refining an existing one, manipulating and partitioning data, data visualizations, and much more. In addition, I worked on back-end functionality like implementing a specified database structure and API contract in models and views, refining back end validations, testing for site reliability and security, and everything in between like maintaining the CI/CD pipeline in deployment to various environments, and maintaining and managing expectations of stakeholders through clear communication regarding sprint status, bandwidth, and feasibility of any particular technical goal.
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.
Currently, I am working as a Lead DevOps Engineer in systems 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 a "Lead", 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.
Outside of work, I enjoy being active, going to the gym, being involved in the community as well as going to conferences, and anything that involves learning something new or challenging myself. I also enjoy mentoring new students and helping people bring out the best in themselves.
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.