I am not the comedian, sorry for anyone stumbling upon this site who hopes to see some puppets. In this site I plan to talk about my experiences in both work and personal life.

Personal Life

I am originally from Northern Virginia (not to be confused with any other part of Virginia) in a suburb close to DC. I currently live in San Diego, CA after a brief stint in Seattle, WA.

My current hobbies include:

• Homebrewing
• Reading (~30ish books a year)
• Running
• Food
• Sports (DC teams generally, but special nod to Crystal Palace in Primere League)
• Being a new dad

Work Life

Amazon

In the Datacenter

I started doing part management for the datacenters in Ashburn Graduated to a data tech role or what can be boiled down to a server parts replacement bot. Ended up working to automate datacenter processses in a title at the time called System Engineer.

Infrastructure

I then worked for an internal infrastructure team at Amazon. It was that team that everyone kind of knows exists at large companies. We were the system engineers running all the infrastructure services nobody else wanted to own. Think things like DNS, IRC, CFEngine, FTP, LDAP, DNS, Loadbalancers, oh and because I worked there we also owned DC Automation. Sorry team I brought that with me.

DynamoDB

Finally worked for a product team! We were still System Engineers, but the role is what you would call SRE now. We worked with the monitoring, scaling, and reliability of the DynamoDB product. I worked heavily on DynamoDB Streams while I was there as well as some internal tools and APIs to expose pieces of DynamoDB infrastructure for automation.

Fitbit

I worked at Fitbit during some hyper growth years as an Infrastructure Engineer. Owning things like Puppet, Aurora/Mesos (yes there was a thing before Kubernetes), DNS, and more. Similar to the Infrastructure team at Amazon, was the team that owned the things nobody else wanted to. We were in a softlayer datacenter and during my tenure I led a team through choosing a cloud (we chose GCP), architecting the move, building the landing zone, and evangelizing the move and new processes. Our main goals were to be more self-service with infrastructure and increased security.

Palo Alto Networks

Working with a mainly Isreali development team for much of my tenure I was the lone engineer in the US. Made for some loneliness, but also a really productive time in my career. I rewrote and sped up XDRs unique provisioning stack as we grew from hundreds to thousands of customers. I worked with many product integrations as my unique role of being the engineer in the US made me suited well to working with other development teams.