Blog

tl;dr “It is with great pleasure that I announce I am joining the Ansible team at Red Hat as Principal Product Marketing Manager.” In The Beginning… In 1998, I was working at a dial-up ISP in Hickory, NC. We were heavily invested in Windows and needed to reduce costs and increase speed. My CEO at the time had the foresight to know that Linux was the future. She hired two engineers to transform the business into a Red Hat Linux based ISP. These engineers had the challenge of swapping platforms and teaching those of us that didn’t abandon ship Linux. My first Linux distro was Red Hat Linux 5 (not RHEL, Red Hat Linux). From that point on, I knew Red Hat was a platform to watch and utilize. ...

I was in the DC metro area when I received an e-mail about the Baltimore Go Meetup happening on June 5th. Since I was nearby, I decided to go ahead and RSVP to the event. I mentioned this on Twitter and shortly thereafter Johnny Boursiquot wondered if I could speak. Of course I said yes. I was already doing a talk that morning at DevNationFederal. What’s another talk in the evening? I’d move heaven and earth for Johnny. His diversity and inclusion efforts are th enormous cherry on top of his substantial contributions to the Go community. ...

Red Hat invited me to speak at DevNationFederal. The organizers requested I present my DevOps is Not War talk to technologists in the Washington DC area. This crowd is a group of folks that are at varying points in their DevOps journeys. Many folks from government agencies and systems integrators were present. I was able to sync up with one of my Airmen from my time at Pope Air Force Base. He was fascinated by Ansible, Kubernetes, and showed particular interest in the concepts of DevOps. He works for a siloed systems integrator and was curious how he could help influence change from within. I gave him a ton of advice and offered to help him implement Ansible playbooks and roles in his workcenter. It was pretty damn cool. ...

I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at DevOpsDays Toronto. This was my first trip into Canada and I have to admit, it was amazing! The city of Toronto is a very diverse city teeming with culture. The speaker dinner was at a wonderful restaurant Eastern Mediterrean restaurant, Byblos. If you are ever in Toronto, I suggest you go to Byblos and get the Turkish Manti Dumplings. I don’t typically enjoy eggplant but these dumplings are superb! ...

If you read DevOps’ish, you already know I spoke at ChefConf 2018. I was able to meet 1,400 new friends while I was in Chicago (not really but kinda). I presented my talk, DevOps is Not War to a standing room only audience. From a speaker’s perspective, I have never felt more prepared for a talk. There were speaker office hours every week for 10 weeks before the event to address any questions we may have had. On top of that, Anna Boynton, was available to all speakers to coach us through some of our not so great points. Anna looked at video from DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018 to help me hone the talk to a very tight time slot while hitting every main point needed. ...