Professional Life
I’m currently a Site Reliability Engineering Manager and tech lead for my team at CFA Institute, and I’ve never felt more in my element. My team is comprised mostly of engineers who are new to SRE or early in their careers, and I am in the fortunate position to get to guide them from curious beginners into confident problem-solvers.
I find this work of building up engineers deeply rewarding.
I’m equally fortunate to work alongside a manager whose strengths and interests provide a perfect counter-balance to my own. I’m really good at getting into the technical weeds of an issue, and he’s really good at taking my often jargon filled blabbering and communicating it to relevant stakeholders and leadership. While we are both pretty moderate in our opinions of AI, he’s much more likely to be described as an AI Accelerationist, and I’m closer to the doomer side. He’s an Apple guy (nobody’s perfect), myself a Linux/Android guy.
One of the best parts of my role is the freedom to experiment. A recent example has been in AI. When ChatGPT-3 hit the main stream, my manager encouraged me to explore how generative AI might fit into our workflows very early on. That encouragement led me down a rabbit hole of pilots, failure modes, and ultimately a set of recommendations I’ve published on this blog.
Above all, I’m focused on continuing to broaden my own skills while lifting up others and delivering measurable impact. CFA Institute is the perfect size for that: large enough to have complex challenges, but small enough that I’ve never felt like just a cog in the machine. As long as I can keep mentoring, learning, using the tech I like and making tangible improvements to our reliability posture, I’m honestly in no hurry to climb further up the org chart.
Home Life
The biggest news is that Brittaney is pregnant! We have a baby boy on the way in late July/early August. We’re obviously all super excited about that, but it’s been a joy to see Grace really come to understand that she’s going to be a big sister. She takes that super seriously, telling everyone she knows and even saying bye to mom’s belly when I walk her to school! CFA Institute has a very generous paternity leave plan, so I’ll likely be able to take off until the end of the year to help out with little man when he gets here.
The Disney trip was successful and a ton of fun! Some highlights for me were building lightsabers and a BB-8 for Grace, I had an emotional moment meeting Mary Poppins, we surprised my brother-in-law with Space 220 at Epcot, I had an emotional moment meeting Captain Jack Sparrow, we got to ride the Jurassic Park dinosaur ride before it closed, and I had an emotional moment meeting Buzz Lightyear!
Media I’m Taking In
- Michael Jackson was the greatest entertainer to ever live, so of course we went to see the Michael biopic, and of course we loved it
- I just finished reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, and I ate it up. Thanks for the recommendation Chandler!
- I’m currently reading:
