I’ve always been a tech-geek. In the 1980’s my brother started an unsuccessful software company that produced pre microsoft word/pre word-perfect word processing software for the commodore vic20 and I used his software in high school to do my schoolwork and fell in love with computers and technology
At my first job after college in the late 80’s/early 90’s I was doing troubleshooting via PC remote control software and doing field service in LA for data collection terminals and software. The terminals were programmed by field service personal in some arcane method of button pushing so I wrote a front end using the API in order to make it easy to view and change customer specific settings
After that I worked for Epson supporting and troubleshooting printers and scanners. I wrote some software (this was in Borland Turbo Pascal…that was “back in the day”) that allowed us to stream HP PCL language commands in a controlled fashion to laser printers in order to troubleshoot printing and driver issues
getting slightly more modern, I did QA and wrote QA automation for a few companies near the y2k days. I worked for a classic and now long-gone “dot com” company that had 15 people when I started and about 60 when I left. At that company I started doing QA but switched to build/deploy automation and never looked back. I had a really cool SGI Indigo workstation at my desk
We had a visual basic app that we converted to pre 1.0 Java and I got to go to Sun Microsystems to get pre java 1.0 training. We were very much on the cutting edge doing some distributed software dev using things like corba
Following that I got really into version control software. I wrote custom wrappers for PVCS that were used by hundreds of people at a GE company that I worked for. I converted companies from vc tool to vc tool including Perforce, CVS, Subversion, IBM ClearCase and others until the magic of distributed version control systems appeared. I played a bit with pre-git tools like bazaar and I was a huge fan of mercurial, but git correctly made it to the top of the heap
I converted and trained developers on git at multiple companies including intensive training on git internals. I wrote some dashboards that used git/githubs apis. I deployed and managed github enterprise on premise instances
More recently containerization and tools to orchestrate containers such as Kubernetes came to the forefront and again I was hooked. See Kubernetes for more details related to my history with Kubernetes
Another love of mine is process. Gathering requirements, designing, poc’s, testing, automating, providing dashboards and integrations and reporting etc. See My personal tech guiding principles for a bit more on this
that led quickly into secops/security scanning that was well integrated into a company Software Dev Lifecycle. Here’s some information (password protected, so ask me for the password if you are a potential partner/employer) about a custom security app/dashboard that i wrote My Custom Trivy Microservice Scanner