some technical background…

In my past, I’ve primarily been a software developer/architect and have been developing software professionally for well over 20 years. I never really thought of computer science as a career; I was working as an accountant, finishing my university studies and took a course on Unix and C++ on a whim. I LOVED IT!! So in 1997, I got my first job as a software engineer.

I started my professional software career writing in Visual FoxPro and VisualBasic. I then moved on to Java shortly after Y2K, continuing with that for many, many years. I’ve also done some C#, Python, and even a little Perl.

Funny story with Y2K. I was working for Citi and was on-site for the clock to turn. I just remember being worried that the badge scanners may not work, so I made sure to go out for a cigarette early enough to get back in! (☝️ I haven’t smoked in years…don’t smoke kids!)

Now, I love the Go programming language!

I’ve even become the Organizer for the St. Louis Go Meetup. You can view some of our past sessions on our YouTube channel.

The last few years, I’d been architecting and building microservices while working with various cloud technologies: Kubernetes, Linkerd (service mesh), Helm, and Kafka–this list also includes Grafana, Prometheus, and even k6. I even contributed to some open source projects; Linkerd and Viper being some of the names you may know.

So by now, I’d once again reached a point to slightly pivot my career trajectory to focus more on providing mentorship, teaching, and community building for engineers.