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
My baby girl finished up Kindergarten and we are wrapping up her first summer vacation. There have been a ton of King’s Dominion trips, seeing family and friends, travelling, and making this summer one to remember for all of us.
We’ve gotten to watch her and my wife both face down and conquer fears of certain roller coasters, which every time has just been a jolt of pure dopamine to experience. We’ve even gotten my niece to try some rides she never thought she’d get on! Courage is contagious, and I’ve been so proud of all of them!
We are planning a trip to Disney in January! That will be so much fun, and we’ll really be able to flex all of our roller-coaster riding muscles we’ve built up!
We made a trip to Boston recently to visit my best friend and his family, and we got to experience the Red Sox win at Fenway. It was probably the best baseball game I’ve ever experienced: perfect weather, the crowd was electric, the game itself was exciting (a 6 run rally in the 4th).
Media I’m Taking In
- We just finished the Skywalker Saga, and will be starting Andor and Rouge One
- I’m currently reading:
