I am an empathetic, kind, and experienced technical leader who has transformed the careers of countless professionals around the world through my work in open source and the global DevOps movement.
I am passionate about helping technical teams be their best selves and do their best work. I do this through building great tools and products, coaching and mentoring team members, and lead with a customer focused mindset.
I managed the team and led the effort to migrate the Barracuda Email Gateway Defense (EGD) production infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Container Service (ECS) to Kubernetes. This provided consistent deployment experience for development teams to reduce friction and problems with new deployment, and enable workflows to bring the service online in new global regions.
I led the EGD engineering organization’s effort to migrate code repositories and CI/CD build pipelines from BitBucket to GitHub. This included critical cross-organizational shared code repositories used by a dozen different product organizations across Barracuda, including the EGD SaaS and other Email Protection appliance products.
Planned, coordinated, and ran community events for Allma to generate share learning with others, establish a basis of expertise, and generate product interest in the market. Led and participated in weekly “HangOps” with the DevOps community. Coordinated and led the monthly Allma meetup, “Disruptions and Discoveries””
Performed due diligence tasks related to technical operations and internal infrastructure for the acquisition of Chef by Progress. Source code analysis, license review, security measures, disaster recovery and prevention, and customer metrics were key areas for the DD. After the acquisition, worked with Progress leadership to hire new team members to work on the Hosted Chef infrastructure, including designing job roles and responsibilities, and coordinating domain knowledge transfer of all aspects of technical operations
Managed and participated on the team of Sr. SRE/Operations Engineers that run Hosted Chef, the world’s first configuration management software as a service. Built automation and pipelines for deploying resilient services in AWS EC2, RDS, ELB, and S3. Key technologies: Chef Infra, Ruby, Terraform, Shell (Bash), AWS EC2/RDS/ELB/S3, ELK, Grafana, Sensu/Sensu-Go, GitHub, Buildkite, Hashicorp Vault.
Designed, deployed, and maintained the Kubernetes cluster running over a dozen internal and external applications critical to Chef’s marketing, legal, and engineering organizations. Key technologies: Kubernetes/Kops, AWS EC2/RDS/ELB, Prometheus, GitHub, Buildkite, Hashicorp Vault.
Participated as SDE III and operations engineer on the Habitat core team, designing and writing packaging plans to deploy, manage, and run common technologies across service oriented architectures and microservice application deployments in containerized and cloud native workloads. Participated in the invention of US Patent 10,380,365. Key technologies: Habitat, Docker, Shell (Bash), Ruby On Rails, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, nginx, Apache Tomcat, NodeJS.
Designed, authored, maintained, and presented Chef Fundamentals training materials. This is instructor-led technical training that was used to teach thousands of practitioners how to use Chef Infra to automate infrastructure.
Designed, authored, maintained and stewarded over 100 open source projects for automating infrastructure as code using Chef Infra. Worked with the Chef open source and broader web operations communities to develop best practices around testing cookbooks, configuring build pipelines for continuous integration to run those tests, and continuous deployment pipelines to distribute cookbooks to services such as Chef Supermarket and Chef Infra Server. Key technologies: Chef Infra, Ruby, Shell (Bash/ZSH), database systems (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and more), Supervision software (systemd, runit, daemontools), Git/GitHub, TravisCI, Test Kitchen.
Participated and led efforts in the worldwide DevOps movement, from its earliest inception in 2010 through the present. Advocate for humans that collaborate within their organizations by providing shared learning experiences with a focus on operations engineering and site reliability.
May 2024 - January 2025, Remote, Colorado, USA
The Developer Relations (DevRel) team at GX is responsible for interacting with external customers and community members to educate users on the value of the GX Cloud product and how to use and implement it as a data quality solution for their organization. I participated in DevRel priorities including:
April 2022 - May 2024, Remote, Colorado, USA
I managed the SRE team responsible for the availability and efficiency of Barracuda’s Email Gateway Defense (EGD) SaaS, which processes millions of email messages for hundreds of thousands of customers around the world, daily.
My areas of responsibility were:
July 2021 - March 2022, Remote, Colorado, USA
I was responsible for building the community and developer advocacy functions at Allma. To do this, I facilitated and moderated the company’s online meetup, Disruptions and Discoveries, I interviewed industry experts about their experiences building teams and managing stressful workflows such as technical and security incidents.
February 2021 - June 2021, Remote, Colorado, USA
I was responsible for building the community and support functions and organizations at Sym.
September 2008 - January 2021, Remote, Colorado, USA
I managed the SRE Team at Chef Software, Inc. We ran Hosted Chef, the world’s first configuration management software as a service. I also was responsible for a Kubernetes deployment for both internal and external applications, source code and company-wide infrastructure management governance, utilization optimization, and spend control. I also wrote and implemented our incident management, response, and review process.
In this role I accomplished:
As the industry shifted, this job and role are more closely aligned with “SRE” than with “Operations.”
I worked as a part of the production operations team at Chef, primarily managing the Hosted Chef infrastructure. I also deployed a Kubernetes cluster that was used to run several critical external and internal applications, automating the entire stack using a continuous delivery pipeline coupled with Chef Habitat. I provided design insights and situational leadership to move several team initiatives forward, including a new SaaS offering based on Chef Automate.
I was a software development engineer on Chef’s release engineering team. In this role, I provided guidance and new project features to internal teams and external customers in support of our project build infrastructure. From my operations background, I established the incident response and review process so that we can grow as an organization and share our findings with others externally for accountability.
I also worked as a part of the Habitat core maintainers team, where I wrote Habitat plans to package applications and dependencies for our community to use, and participated in the invention of patent 10,380,365.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10380365/en
As a senior operations engineer, I worked on the production operations team at Chef to build and maintain the Hosted Chef SaaS, as well as internal infrastructure and applications.
I drove initiatives to improve team workflow and lay a foundation for a major data center migration from Rackspace hosting to AWS. I implemented Amazon Web Services IAM policies across disparate resources for S3 and EC2 services, and designed the use of “Chef Infra to deploy Chef Infra Server.”
As a technical program manager, I established a curated content program for Chef Infra cookbooks. I worked with the community on a variety of initiatives for to implement frameworks and workflow tools to test open source cookbooks, and customer-owned private cookbooks. I facilitated the release of the initial version of Test Kitchen, and worked with the community to do a complete rewrite of Test Kitchen as it exists today (2021, as of my last date of employment with Chef).
I ensured that internal teams were practicing what we taught out in the field, and that we implemented and used as much of our open source content as possible, and that new employees at Chef would be trained on the products in a manner similar to how we taught customers.
I also had situational leadership to influence decision makers and stakeholders on areas where we could improve our open source community outreach, training opportunities, and provided guidance to marketing for increasing our presence and exposure in large industry conferences.
This role is most closely aligned in a combination of “DevRel” and “Customer Success”, today.
As Director of Training and Services, I led a team of technical evangelists and professional services consultants that helped customers implement Chef Infra to solve their business problems. I managed performance and workloads, guided the team on the best methods to deliver training to customer teams, and led the effort to develop Chef Infra cookbooks and related code, including the implementation of open source cookbooks.
This role is most closely aligned with “DevRel”, today.
In the role of technical evangelist, I worked as a developer relations advocate to write Chef Infra cookbooks and libraries, and helped countless people make the most out of Chef Infra to solve their hardest business problems related to infrastructure automation. I developed and fostered a community of empathetic professionals, which evolved in part as the worldwide DevOps movement. I designed, wrote, and delivered Chef Fundamentals in person training courses to help hundreds of people learn Chef Infra. I also consulted with several organizations on deploying Chef Infra to manage complex application infrastructures.
In this time, I also collaborated with Linux distribution contributors for Debian and Ubuntu to package Chef Infra and its dependencies for inclusion in those distributions.
July 2008 - September 2008, Remote, Colorado, USA
I supported web startups as a Linux system administration and operations engineering consultant.
HJK Solutions was acquired by Chef Software, Inc.
May 2007 - Jun 2008, Denver, CO
As a member of the operations team at SANS, I collaborated with technical teams with in the company to ensure the smooth deployment of a new data center, web site stack, and internal applications that ran critical business components. I designed the automation and deployment platform to rapidly build out new servers as they were delivered to grow capacity.
In this role, I led the team in learning new configuration management with Puppet, and OS provisioning automation with kickstart on CentOS and RHEL. I also designed automation around security controls and ensured that SANS - the global leader in IT security training - was practicing what they taught. I implemented automation to remediate for the CIS Benchmarks on CentOS and RHEL using Puppet.
September 2000 - May 2007, Boulder, CO
While at IBM, I supported 20 different Fortune 500 customer hosted web sites running Solaris, Linux and AIX. I implemented the first IBM ESS storage deployment on Linux for the World Community Grid Project, and implemented Veritas Cluster Server, Sun Cluster, and Linux HA for these customers. I also participated in a high-profile major Solaris migration for a significant finance company. I also performed complete end-to-end audit of critical storage implementation for a telecom company based in Asia.
May 1999 - September 2000, Phoenix, AZ
Formerly EST, now TOLIS Group, makers of the Unix / Linux backup software program BRU. Worked as company system administrator and software development and QA tester. Also provided technical services for the company at international trade shows in New York, Montreal and Sydney.
I have a breadth of experience across multiple types of technology stacks. While my areas of expertise are somewhat narrow out of necessity, I am an adaptable learner and can pick up a new technology, programming language, or toolset quickly.