About
Summary¶
Here's a summary of my career. I've been working with computers since the pre-DOS early 80's and have come up through all kinds of infrastructure and operations roles and have landed squarely in DevOps.
I've been lucky enough to work at NYSE/SIAC, Grubhub, Lehman Brothers/Barclays, and Razorfish, one of the first web agencies.
All this led to my work at a start-up called Brace Software, which occupied the vast majority of the years between 2020 and 2025. Brace's infrastructure was fully GitOps enabled for all infrastructure. We worked through the transition to a DevOps culture, putting full control of deployments into the hands of the developers. After the shock of being locked out of all my AWS environments and tools...Github repos, I realized that this thing was probably gonna run just fine for quite a while, as it had been. THe company was being sold off for parts, to it just has to work. And it will. :)
It all leaves me pretty excited to see what my next project is going to be.
This is just an overview, probably for my own satisfaction, but I hope to pull some of that experience into some interesting or helpful posts.
SF Bay Area¶
Before the Web¶
Before the web [sic] I worked at Ziff-Davis Press, prepping the top computer magazines for CD-ROM [sic] and online distribution on _not compuserve_. I remember well the day I attended a talk in Multimedia Gulch in San Francisco, by a guy named Will, who told us about HTML. That was probably '92.
Then came Linux¶
In '95, some friends installed a pre-1.0 Slackware distro on my 286, and over the next few months, I began to get my head around Linux.
I took a few interesting projects in the web/publishing field. I was the tech editor for the 2nd edition of Larry Aaronson's HTML Manual of Style. ZD Press was located in Emeryville, CA, just a short bike ride from Oakland. I did a few other books for them too, including 2 coffee table books of interesting web sites. Yes, at that time, the web was so new that we read books on paper about web sites. There's some more detail about my first automation on the Career page.
On to Sybase¶
Somehow, I talked my way into being a webmaster on the World Wide Customer Service and Support team at Sybase, also in Emeryville. That place was full of Computer Scientists, bearded-Berkeley types, DBAs, and even Dr. Bob, who was one of the authors of the SQL spec. I was among a small cabal at Sybase, who was pushing to have Linux adopted as a first-class platform.
NYC¶
Razorfish¶
When I moved to New York in '98, I found myself at Razorfish, one of the original web agencies, known for putting the first moving thing on the web. We built some of the first web sites for Georgio Armani, In Style Magazine, and Guardian Life Insurance, among many others, but those were projects I worked on.
Finance and the NYSE¶
I was living in Hell's Kitchen in NYC on Sept. 11th, 2001, and looking for a job at that time. Things were a little rough back then and I unexpectedly found myself in Finance.
Eventually, I took a role with Rosenblatt Securities, an execution-only firm, which had been the first brokers on the NYSE to allow their customers to do their own electronic trading, directly with the NYSE. I had answered a job posting for a Perl developer. One of their clients had written their own trading engine in Perl and he had made a deal with the client to provide execution services in exchange for the use of that software. We were among the first to send FIX (Financial Exchange Protocol) trading messages into the NYSE.
Lehman/Barclays¶
From NYSE, I went to Lehman Brothers as the Lead Perl Developer for a group called POINT (Portfolio and Index Analysis) that did reporting on customer portfolios, based on the company's analytics. Our team did a lot of ETL and I used a lot of Perl for deployments and everything. When Lehman failed in 2007, Barclays Bank bought what was left. My group survived in tact and I wound up working there, until 2014.
Out of the banks¶
My next step took me out of the banks, which meant that I ran the firewalls again. It was a whole new world. Remember that I'd been working under security restrictions at the NYSE and at the banks that was so strict that Github was blocked. We had to get permission to run Open Source Software. The first time I saw a full Redis distro installed as a dep for whatever app I was messing with, I was blown away. Things had changed mightily during that time and boy was I having fun.
Grubhub¶
Next stop was Grubhub in NYC. This is where I became a Cloud Engineer and really got emersed in DevOps. I learned a shit-ton about automation and platform engineering and had the good fortune to work with Matt Osterhaus, who taught me all about IAM. Except for cross-account role assumption, which Mr. James Boylan used for the GH data accounts. He was ahead of his time, but the GH infrastructure had initially been built before Terraform was production-ready, so we had done a lot in Python/Boto3.
Brace¶
I took a break after Grubhub and when I landed again, I was the Lead DevOps Engineer at Brace Software, one of the few modern-technology players in the Mortgage Servicing space. Chris Galardi handed me a bunch of TF that hd had been using to spin up 2 environments in an aws account. In a year, we had a fully-automated GitOps workflow for everything from the VPCs to the app deploys, monitoring, DNS, and user management, as well as a few other things. We used Spacelift as our TACOS, and it was a lifesaver, allowing us to manage development and releases, including to production, with PRs.
A month ago the company that had acquired Brace a year-and-a-half ago, failed. So, I'm writing this and hopefully some other stuff, including some of this history as well as talking tech.
TBD¶
What comes next is TBD. Building out Brace was an amazing experience and I'd love to have the opportunity to apply my experience and love of the discipline again.