About

Transwarp beaming = Really Hard

This movie dialog was written a minimum of 4 years before Docker was a thing.

What I do is not 👆 that hard👆 -- but it's hard

I'm a software engineer in test and scrum master for a group of highly skilled, senior, very intelligent engineers at a pretty big software company. Unlike Spock and Scotty, I work from my home in New York City, and like many at-home "information workers", a whole lot of my personal energy is deployed in the pursuit of my day job -- working on projects like...

• Ephemeral cloud-based *********** service
• Database query optimizations
• Schema changes for new API consumers and new API endpoints 
• Building a ***** service and a ******** service that sits on top of an ***** service while simultaneously building the ***** service
• Building resiliency into all our microservices with retryability, logging, and monitoring

I'm proud that my team works on complicated stuff. The work isn't always straightforward, and there's often the need to continue late into the night, and on the weekends. Maybe because of this way of carrying on, there's a stronger than normal predisposition within my team to behave like owners rather than employees. That's my working theory.

But I also believe that people on my team possess a strong sense of loyalty. After all, we spend A LOT of time with each other on Slack -- during planning, deployments, working through complications, rollbacks, production tuning, 911's, mitigation procedures, and postmortems. I can't speak for anyone else, but doing that kind of work day in and day out carries challenges that may not be fully appreciated by the folks in headquarters.

As of September 9, 2019, I'm officially on sabbatical - which means I get a 6 week hall pass to recharge my batteries, and momentarily stop thinking of software development. And for that, I'm grateful.

Who I am 

I'm a father of twin girls, a husband, a homework ninja, home chef, former unlicensed forklift driver, New York City resident, junior plumber, part time exterminator, shit house lawyer, dishwasher repairman, homeowner, squirrel trapper, military veteran, jiu jitsu black belt, rope climber, amateur gymnast, and lover of pencils. And for 6 wonderful weeks, I'll be on a work sabbatical. During that time, I'll be spending a lot of time with the people I love, and pursuing personal interests that have been sidelined because of work commitments - stuff like fitness goals, writing, and some small home improvement projects. This blog is dedicated to capturing some of the stuff that comes out of that six week period.