Big Data Engineer ©

Who I am I`m a geek-of-all-trades who fell through the looking glass into the world of technology at age 8. Age 8 was in 1980, and the looking glass was an Atari 800 with a BASIC cartridge for an OS and a cassette tape drive for storage, and an acoustic coupler modem for blowing my mind wide open at the idea of connecting to a place and hopping to faraway places and knowing no limits (other than baud rate and busy signals and, you know, all that). As my body has gotten older, my brain in large part stayed the one of an 8-year-old kid poking into the nooks and crannies of a piece of tech and learning how to coax it to do tricks. What I`ve done Through various misadventures, I`ve been the BOFH of a real estate company as it took its first steps into networked computing, wrangled high-scale websites for ABC and ESPN making up what is now called devops and production engineering with my teammates as we went, run Disney`s online data centers and shaped their virtualization -> infra-as-code -> cloud strategy, and am now helping Starbucks do IOT, which really means just making it easier to connect everything everywhere to get data and control stuff. Along the way, I`ve evolved from basic tech savvy person, to skilled reader of logs and shooter of trouble, to scripter who knows enough to not be dangerous, to developer who actually gets why stuff works and mostly how to make it work. These days I can get myself both into and out of trouble in python and java and javascript without just copying code from stackoverflow and tweaking it. And yes, the 8-year-old brain is still full of wonder and delight at each new step of the journey, even when debugging my own code. ©