About Me
Over the last few years, I have had to deal with a personal life event that necessitated taking significant periods of time off work. To get back in the saddle, I set about the work of retooling my career. While working at AWS itself during 2020, I developed an interest in DevOps. I quickly fell in love with Infrastructure as Code and automated deployment, and decided that a career as a DevOps engineer was the right direction.
As an independent, hands-on learner, I like to build things. It seemed to me that a course of action that would match my style would be to build a portfolio of projects by which I could show, not tell, what I can do. I started out small: taking courses on Udemy, reading articles on Medium, and reading the AWS documentation and implementing AWS documentation how-to’s. Having come to a point where I have a respectable collection of arrows in my skills quiver, this year has proven rewarding in my portfolio project work. During the course of working on these projects, I have grown in confidence, range and velocity.
I would describe my skill level as strong intermediate. With respect to the basic DevOps technologies, such as Terraform, Terragrunt, GitHub Actions and Python, I can pretty much wrestle down any problem independently and come up with an elegant solution. I still enjoy application development, and am up to date with FastAPI, Python and various databases to that end. Where some of my seasoning over the years shows through as more senior, I am quite adept at architecting larger solutions for complex use cases. I am also at a senior skill level with unit tests/TDD and integration tests.
This is a journey. If you’re evaluating me based on my portfolio work presented here, I would say that I am where you find me. I am continuing to work on my projects, and will be updating this site as more work is completed. Looking ahead on this path, I am open to several areas of growth. I’d love to use my architectural and product skills to develop a big solution for a complex use case, and I really, really want to acquire some production experience in DevOps. I am also open to mentoring young (or young at heart) startups which I find resonates with my nurturing nature.
My personal life is blessed with rewarding hobbies and activities. I started taking singing lessons as a classical singer in 2019 and continue practicing. I have also rekindled my teenage interest in bonzai and have three bonzai trees that I started from acorn, and am looking forward to making some nursery runs for some more mature stock to grow my collection. Cooking and mindfulness meditation are also enjoyable activities for me.
Thank you for stopping by to learn about me. If you’d like to meet up and figure out how I can help you, drop me a line and we can set something up!