I’ve been a Web Developer, Software Engineer, Systems Architect for the past 15+ years. I have a deep passion for all things technology, these days I’m currently in love with all things Go, Kubernetes, Containers, Distributed Systems and Information Security. I occasionally like to imagine I know something about hardware and embedded systems.
Interesting facts about me:
- I co-authored Go in Action, a book about the Go programming language that has been translated to 3 additional languages.
- I co-organize GopherCon, a multi-track conference for the Go programming language that attracts 1,500+ developers every year.
- I founded and co-hosted Go Time, a podcast on the Go programming language.
- I have contributed to many OSS projects, including Ruby on Rails, the Go programming language, Docker, Kubernetes, wrote the initial SkyDNS which is used by Kubernetes for DNS based service discovery, and was one of the creators and core contributors of Virtual Kubelet.
- I organize / co-organize multiple meetup groups surrounding Go and cloud native technologies.
my history
My curiosity of computers began in my early childhood years playing on a family member’s Macintosh SE. I was too young to understand the world of programming then, but it was enough to peak my interest. In my teen years the internet became very popular and I was infatuated with the concept of building my own websites, and like all teenage computer geeks the thrill of “learning to hack”. I cut my teeth building my own websites and learned to program by modifying open-source forum software in Perl and PHP, and running my own Counter-Strike servers. Before I knew it I was being offered money to program as a profession. I’ve been in the open-source and Linux world ever since.
I spent a lot of my early career as a Web Developer at Disney working on their e-commerce platforms in Java and their own internal language and spent the rest of my career moving further and further down the stack as my interests in deeply technical topics, systems programming and distributed computing became a passion. After that, I did a several year stint working for startups building high-scale distributed systems for things like fraud detection, mostly in Ruby and the Go programming language.
The past couple years I’ve been at Comcast working on Kubernetes, Docker and distributed systems designing and building their linear video streaming platform that provides cable video for millions across the country. It really resonated with my love for high-scale distributed systems and unique challenging problems.
Today, I work as a Principal Cloud Advocate for Microsoft Azure, where I focus on linux, containers, kubernetes, distributed system with a particular focus on high-scale, high-availability, multi-region deployments. This role gives me the opportunity to be actively involved in the OSS community and contribute to OSS projects.
Outside of engineering roles, I’ve been very passionate about helping educate and build communities around the Go programming language, Kubernetes and Docker. I’ve contributed to all of these projects, co-authored a book on Go, co-host a podcast about Go and co-organize GopherCon, an annual conference for the Go programming language that attracts more than 1,500 developers each year.
In my downtime I’m very interested in information security, linux internals, assembly, embedded programming and electronics and have a couple hobby projects like a bbq grill controller I try to sneak time into as I can.