Joining Autonomic #TalentAtAutonomic

I’m very excited to be joining Autonomic this coming Monday. They do self-driving car data. I’m joining as Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help grow the infrastructure by several degrees of magnitude. I expect to be doing a lot of Kubernetes and learning Golang as I go.

This draws to a close 14 years at IBM. My last few months at IBM have been spent recruiting some very strong team members, and I trust that the IBM Developer Skills Network and Cognitive Class are in great hands.

I joined IBM as co-op student. My university buddy Gerald had set his MSN Messenger status to “Message me if you want a job”. It was late in the semester and I was singularly bad at interviewing back then, so I jumped on the opportunity. I spent that year writing tutorials for using the IBM Db2 database and its exciting XML features with various programming languages. A few years later, that morphed into putting Db2 on the cloud, then Apache Hadoop, and then developing and operating an education site about all sorts of open source technologies with hands-on labs and a couple million students.

I’m leaving IBM as a Senior Software Developer Manager (or perhaps a Principal Engineer), but on a technical side what I do has been Site Reliability Engineering. Past a certain scale, you need to start thinking of operations in terms of acceptable error budgets and of instrumenting the right service level indicators to properly judge the health of many large, distributes services coming together to deliver an experience. I’m excited to have the opportunity to apply the same principles at ever larger scales at Autonomic.

Post-Scriptum

I wish to officially register my complaint about the lack of a gnome emoji in Unicode. These folks exist:

🧝🧝🏾‍♂️🧝🏿‍♀️🐉🐲🧙🧙🏻‍♂️🧙🏽‍♀️🦄🧟🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️

Yet there is no gnome. If there had been, I could have said that I’m joining 🚗nomic in even fewer characters!