Crazy, I guess it’s been almost 9 years since I’ve posted here so I’m rebooting the blog once again. I’m not sure if it’s my age or the current place in my life or career that has me feeling like I have some things to share here, but whatever the reason is, I’m back.

The last time I posted here I was a staff software developer working in education technology. In December 2018 I moved into a engineering leadership role, taking responsibility for the team that I’d been an individual contributor on for years. In 2020 my role expanded when the group/product I worked for was sold to another company. Right as Covid was shutting everything down in the US my team reached ~20 individual contributors of software, devops and QA engineers. It was a lot, especially because I hadn’t managed a devops team before. With the team I also inherited a 7 figure annual AWS budget which I’d never managed before either.

Thankfully, over the next couple years, the number of reports I managed directly was reduced as I hired and promoted several team leads and managers. Additionally, I was fortunate to help hire the best boss I’ve ever had - he took over the devops team and related budget and I was able to refocus on the product development team of software and QA engineers.

More on what I’ve learned from those experiences in future posts I hope. I’d also like to write more here about things I like doing outside of work like mountain biking, hiking and snowboarding. I’ll probably also post about other tech stuff I’m interested in from time to time. It feels like generative AI and LLMs are everywhere these days and I’ve been recently exploring these topics - a post or two will likely land here at some point as well.

I expect most of this will be just me talking to myself publicly, but that’s ok. If you do happen to follow along at some point and have something to add to the conversation hit me up on the socials. As of this writing I’m mostly hanging out on Bluesky.