
Hi, I’m Dan. In a past life I was a operations minded DevOps practitioner for now, focusing on all the normal things like infrastructure as code as a means to automation and reproducibility, building better tools and frameworks to enable myself and my coworkers to build better things, faster. Now I manage software development teams, taking the next step down shift-left mindset. It has been a new adaventure, starting out with development teams more aligned with operations, i.e those working close with infrastructure and requiring a firm understanding of how the full stack down to the hypervisor and networking interplay, but still development teams. By bringing a strong production first mindset and comfortable incident response ethos it has allowed the team to get comfortable with truly owning their services and on-call rotations. Developers on call, who would have believed it.
I have been fooling around with computers as long as I can remember, some of my earliest memories are of computers and electronics. I repeatedly dabbled in programming throughout my childhood, learning various languages and environments. Eventually I discovered networking and systems administration, working with servers, clients, networks, packets, services, etc- I was hooked. I love the logistics and problems faced in computer systems, deploying scalable, robust and resilient services is, for me, much more exciting than writing them. From this systems perspective, combining my interests of programming and logistics made the transition into DevOps and focusing on automating solutions rather than fixing things one by one by hand was natural.
Getting into management has been a completely different adventure– human systems are so much more esoteric and complex but rewarding in their own way. Leading a team means working towards different goals than as an individual, pushing to achieve what is best for the team.