This May 1, I joined Upgrade Inc as a Principal DevOps Engineer on the Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) team. Technically this is a change of industries from automotive to financial. I was previously at Autonomic, a Ford subsidiary, as a Principal Site Reliability Engineer on the Observability team there. In practice, my clients continue to be my fellow engineers.
I learned a lot in my time at Autonomic from many wonderful people. Before Au, I had only a superficial knowledge of Kubernetes, and certainly had never touched the Go programming language. Nothing is a better teacher than many, many hands-on projects. Upon joining Upgrade, I discovered that they were already using something I had written and open sourced in Go, which feels like an unexpected compliment.
As I was finishing up at Au, one of my colleagues asked me — how am I so productive? To some extent that the illusion of the public record — we know our failings, but of others we mostly only know their successes. Still, an interesting question. It’s not because I’m immune to procrastination — I scroll through the internet as much as anyone else. It’s not because I put in more hours — overtime is for exceptional circumstances, not everyday, and it is not sustainable. I think I appear productive because I love solving the puzzles that come up in our profession, and completed projects have a way of accumulating.
Leo on Tech 