Welcome

Hey, welcome to my website! Let me just start off by saying, thank you for taking the time to read this. I really appreciate it and I hope you find the content on this site interesting or helpful in some way.

Who am I

Well, the title I have is sometimes referred to as Software Developer, Coder, Programmer, Techie, Nerd or as I refer to it nowadays… Software Engineer.

I really started programming in College. I say really, because one time in middle school, maybe high school, I opened up a C++ book I came across and tried to follow the instructions. It was how to write “Hello, world!” and I was stuck on downloading the suggested IDE on our family computer, some old, used Windows desktop. Bad experience and didn’t get to see code again until my Sophomore year of college.

From then on, I was hooked! A few internships, a Computer Science degree and a baby later, I accepted an offer to work at Raytheon as a Software Engineer. There, I worked on Signals Intelligence applications. This is where I was first introduced to container runtime environments like Docker and Rkt and also where I was introduced to Kubernetes.

After doing that for a year, I decided to work as a Software Engineer in another industry and switched over to Data Science and it’s applications in Advertising. I learned a lot about web scraping, selenium and it’s capabilities of mimicking web activity and how to use Azure’s AKS (their Kubernetes abstraction at the time) with Visual Studio Team Services (Microsoft’s CI/CD platform a.k.a. Azure DevOps). It was good experience in research, data analysis and leading projects and initiatives to completion.

Then, I got the opportunity to work on the Billing team at DigitalOcean. Writing and maintaining the software that tracks which products a customer uses and the invoicing that takes that data and provides the customer with an accurate and timely invoice. I learned a lot about process and monitoring here. Also got to experience on-call rotation for the first time. Some interesting things that I did on that team was create an api service to store account information using grpc gateway to expose the service as both rest and grpc, define and create the SLOs/SLIs for the team’s services using Grafana and Prometheus and write caching logic that used Spaces to upload and fetch invoice CSVs for our customers.

This experience, along with my contributions and membership in Kubernetes, allowed me to get the opportunity to internally transfer to the team responsible for DOKS (DigitalOcean’s managed Kubernetes). This is the team I am currently on and so far I love it! Being able to work on something that so many people rely on is fulfilling and brings both excitement and challenges to the job!