About Me
Hey there, I’m Cam! You’ve stumbled on my blog, where I write about stuff that is interesting to me which typically includes tech and leadership topics. This document will cover some highlights of my journey from a kid playing on a dial-up PC to now to leading my excellent team of Reliability Engineers at CFA Institute.
Childhood & Early Tech Passion
Windows 95, AOL Instant Messenger, and One Hour a Day
One of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me was in the ’90s, my dad brought home an old Windows 95 machine from work. They had upgraded all the hardware and he was in a position at the time to salvage one of the machines from being hauled away.
My earliest memories are of that machine, propped up on a desk in our living room. He only let me sit at the keyboard for one hour a day, but even early on I remember playing games, exploring the early web, hearing the “You’ve Got Mail” whenever I opened up AOL. I remember picking up the landline phone and hearing the sounds of the internet.
Looking back on it now, it’s difficult to understate how blessed and privileged I was to have that kind of access to a machine and the web at such an early age. It was the first thing I remember truly having passion for, and feeling the mix of disappointment that my time was up and excitement for tomorrow’s fresh hour. In those hour increments, the seed of who I would become as an adult were truly being planted.
Marine Corps & Signals Intelligence
Joining for a Jumpstart
Skipping ahead a few years, in high school, I’d felt like the destiny appointed to me by seemingly everyone else in my life was college. With very few exceptions, I was fortunate enough to have some absolutely excellent teachers in school who invested in me and my success (teachers are saints, full stop), and therefore it was easy for me to be a consistently strong student. My school system had the resources to have an incredible number of dual enrollment and AP classes, so I took as many of them as I could, which ended up being quite a few. Despite that, the idea taking on college debt felt insurmountable, especially growing up within a single-parent house.
So, I joined the Marines for a quick enlistment to learn a skill, get my GI bill, then move on.
I picked the Marine Corps for a couple of reasons:
- I fell for the recruitment
propagandaallure - Just like my granddaddy before me, a man who decided to jump out of airplanes because he really liked the boots the paratroopers wore, I really wanted to wear the dress blues
Linux in the Fleet
I was fortunate enough to score pretty high on my ASVAB, so my MOS ended up being “Signals Intelligence Operator”. At one of my job schools, I got my first Linux exposure: a quick, high-level overview—no terminals, just a note that sometimes you’d use Linux instead of Windows or Mac.
Once I made it to the fleet, in a series of events that makes a great case for Divine intervention, I ended up quickly being able to sit in on a more advanced Linux class.
I remember watching the instructor write a simple bash script to clean his desktop of some logs that were generated by some piece of software. The entire “script” couldn’t have been much more than rm -rf ~/Desktop/*.log.
That moment, that simple action, sparked my passion for software that hasn’t slowed down since. I spent the next nights in the barracks teaching myself Python (v2 at the time) on Codecademy and JavaScript on FreeCodeCamp. Even while at work as a young junior Marine, I’d look for opportunities to spend time learning to code.
I ended up being on the right side of luck again, because my obsession caught the attention of the right people at the time, which led me to be hand picked to deploy with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit in 2016. Upon return I became an instructor, and later Chief Instructor, for a Computer Network Exploitation course. My “fairy-tale ending” moment included refining and teaching the very same Linux fundamentals class that I was lucky enough to sit in years earlier.
Excellence Despite Dissatisfaction
While it’s my preference to count my blessings and remain aware of my privilege, my time in the military wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. One key lesson from my time in the Marine Corps is this: excelling at work you enjoy is easy, but real character shows in the quality of the tasks or work you hated.
I learned that one should strive to be excellent at whatever they set out to do, even if they don’t love every second of doing it.
There are things that I am grateful for in my time, but the Marine Corps also gave me plenty not to love.
Going in I knew I wasn’t a “lifer”, but I threw myself into the job and it resulted in a service record I am proud of, including a deployment (which were less and less common during my time), my promotion to Sergeant (E-5), and was recognized by my battalion on various occasions as the Marine of the Month and NCO of the Quarter.
Microsoft, SRE, & Open Source Exploration
MSSA & Landing at Microsoft
When it came time to start considering my next steps after I EAS’d, I was fortunate enough to join the Microsoft Software & Systems Academy (MSSA) veterans program. At the end of the program, I interviewed and was ultimately hired on at Microsoft as a Site Reliability Engineer. It was in this role I first dug into observability and reliability concepts.
The monitoring system we used at Microsoft was built internally and built explicitly for global scaled services. To get a better grasp on some of the more basic concepts of observability, I learned how to self-host Grafana and Prometheus on my laptop. This was the second big “Aha” moment of my career: I saw how much intuition good data visualization provides and discovered the joy of self-hosting open source products, a passion that has grown into my Lab.
Reliability at CFA Institute
After leaving Microsoft, I joined CFA Institute as an Automation Integration Engineer, a contract role focused on migrating IT from Service Now to Jira. Right about the time the project was finishing up, an opportunity opened up in the company’s Site Reliability team, which led to me stepping into the role as Site Reliability Engineering Manager. Funny enough, I’d interviewed previously at CFA for an SRE role, but was turned down by the previous SRE leadership.
If I had a nickel for every time I mention a full circle moment in this article, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Now, for the first time in my career, I am able to use the tools and technologies that I love while also being able to guide a team of engineers through interesting technical challenges. I get to build a team culture that promotes knowledge sharing, and I have the honor of being a part of a team of crack shot engineers who teach me new things all the time.
Mentorship, Sponsorship, & Leadership
Recognizing My Privilege
Privilege, luck, and hard work are not mutually exclusive. No one will be able to convince me that I didn’t put in my hours with my nose to the grindstone, but it would also be silly to think that neither the privilege lottery I won at birth as a cis/het white male nor the almost comical number of lucky breaks I’ve gotten hasn’t contributed to me being where I am, so let me be the first to acknowledge that.
I’m a big fan of the “Rising Tide Lifts All Boats” metaphor, even if I don’t often think about it in its original economic context. For me, I truly believe that doing what I can to help others around me succeed will generate more value in the system, even if I don’t reap all of that value myself, than any value I would personally gain if I were to focus solely on my own success. I like the idea of “being the rising tide”, and keeping my privilege and luck at the forefront of my mind helps me remember that “my cup runneth over” plenty to share with others.
I believe in more than simply not pulling up the ladder behind me, I strive to reach back and help others climb it. What that looks like today is I both formally and informally mentor engineers, and actively seek opportunities for sponsorship and pursue them whenever they come up. Whether it’s code reviews, skills forge sessions, or career advice, being that guiding hand is one of the the most rewarding parts of my work.
Let’s Connect
If any of this resonates, I’d love to talk technology, open source, observability, or leadership… seriously, all day. Check out my Contact page, or hit me up here in the comments!