When asked by my 1st grade teacher what I wanted to be when I grew up I replied without any hesitation, "Batman". Life quickly taught me that career path wasn’t happening & the news about Santa Claus stung too. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a long time other than I enjoyed computers and donuts a lot. So it made sense I got my bachelors in accounting? And my first job as an ad and community manager for Digg.com
It wasn’t until our acquisition, my new role generating reports manually over and over while I saw our engineers building really cool and impactful stuff that I wanted in. So I did something about it. I wrote an app automating my job essentially & asked the engineer director for a Jr. engineer role. It worked! With fantastic mentorship I grew quickly in my role, but it wasn’t until I was hired at Uber on the infrastructure team that I learned about what DevOps is, & how vital a role an SRE plays & how lucky I was to be a part of that team. In the nerdiest way possible we were the “Batman” of the engineering organization.
If you asked your customers to name their favorite features of your products or company, it’s unlikely that their lists would begin with reliability, security, or continuity of the experience. These are expectations, not features. But this requires an organization of many "Batman's" working in an orchestrated, thoughtful approach towards automating the delivery of these expectations at scale.
Behind the mask of this "Batman" is me, Woody. Friendly human, donut lover, with an obsession for automating all aspects of my life. In my career I have worn many hats along the way including: ad manager, jr. engineer, software engineer, tools engineer, & SRE. My background is far from traditional & it's the best quality I bring to a team in my opinion. I can adapt quickly to new roles & I approach some problems differently, & excel at cross-collaboration, communication, & enjoy working with other teams. The unique background to my career has kept me ambitious, yet humble.
Moving back to Washington for family reasons, I continued working & learning cloud infrastructure on AWS, but also some exciting new opportunities where I spent my time volunteering as a volunteer STEM high school teacher, & high school basketball coach.
The company I join must respect work/life balance, enforce a culture that hires both brilliant people, but who are also decent human beings.
Be humble, empathetic, & always maintain the attitude of a student.
My code gists A mix of one liners, snippets, and interview question answers I have compiled. This site is relatively new so I apologize for it being a bit difficult to navigate.