About Me

About Me Personally

My life's goal consists of three words: interested and interesting. If, at the end of my life, that's part of the conversation, I will count my time here a success.

I'm fiercely loyal. Some just call me fierce. (Sometimes in a good way, sometimes not.)

I care. A lot. I care enough to try, to have hard conversations, to say difficult things, to give honest opinions and real thoughts. Not everyone appreciates that, but I keep trying and I keep caring... because otherwise, what's the point?

Work and Life

I don't believe in "work-life balance".

For two things to be balanced presupposes that they're opposing forces - and for me, they're not. My life informs my work; my work informs my life.

Being great at my job makes me a better person, which makes me a better parent and friend. Taking care of my people makes me a better employee. Spending time with my teenage daughters or my mom give me new perspectives, which makes for better ideas. They're not different things; they're all part of what makes me successful.

Standards

I could never be called a perfectionist, but I don't use "good enough" as an escape hatch when things get hard.

"Good enough" is for when it's actually good enough.

The scale I try to live by - personally and professionally - is:

  1. Is it right?
  2. Is it good?
  3. Is it beautiful?

I don't always get to the beautiful part, but it's the goal.

Perspective

I'm non-traditional. Always have been.

A "non-traditional" student. An Observability Engineer who approaches from the developer's side, rather than the SRE's.

A Data Engineer, who builds custom tooling when off-the-shelf solutions were not in the budget.

I'm perspicacious - which is a fancy word for someone who notices things, connects dots, and asks why.

Curiosity and Thinking

I ask questions - a lot of questions.

I don't invoke "industry best practices" without understanding them. It's easy to fall back on "the way things are done", because it saves time and saves thinking.

In tech as in life, there’s rarely one “right” way - just the expedient way, the easy way, the cheap way, the interesting way, the efficient way, and the fun way. I like exploring which one fits the moment.

Thinking is often a messy and thankless business, but is worth it.

What I Love

I'm an all-around data nerd. - the one who lights up at the prospect of diving into millions of rows of data while everyone else hopes for the mercy of a fire alarm or natural disaster.

I'm a thinker. I see both the forest and the trees. Give me little context, and I can see down the road a ways - what might happen, what to expect, and how pitfalls can be avoided. Some call that over-thinking; I like to think of it as engineering foresight.

I'm a word nerd, too. That might seem irrelevant in a technical career, but communication is everything. A rich vocabulary sharpens writing, presenting, designing, and mentoring - and honestly, having just the right word makes for better solutions.

For the record: I'm #TeamOxfordComma and yes, there should be t-shirts.