Hello World - Introduction

Hi everyone, 

this is the first time that I am blogging in a long time. I am slowly approaching the point at which I will have been a manager for longer than an IC. So I figured it is a good inflection point to start writing down my thought about IC work, managing ICs, and how I moved from IC and management. Hopefully I will be at some point able to start talking about managing managers :) 

Here is a short overview what I did over the last ten years:

Individual Contributor

• Amazon - Amazon was my first corporate job out of school and worked on two different teams both in the warehouse management area. My first team was responsible for all conveyance systems within a warehouse. The main challenge on this team was the state of the services, when I started (which coincided with the team being reformed the 3rd time) we got paged about every other day. By the time I left the team we got the number of incidents down to one page every other month. The second team I joined looked into automatically planning staffing assignment to optimize the number of shipments a warehouse can fulfill.
• Microsoft - I spent a short time at Microsoft. I joined the OneSDK team working on the VisualStudio integration with Azure. I worked on a way to allow our customers to scale their metrics ingestion since the original version of metrics export created a hot key that limited the amount of metrics that could be exported. We supported our customers by enabling them to deploy their own ElasticSearch clusters on Azure and export metrics to ElasticSearch.
• VMware - At VMware I joined a team that was working on a light weight alternative to VMware vSphere ESXCloud/PhotonPlatform this platform evolved into providing customer with an easy way to deploy container orchestration engines (DockerSwarm, Mesos, Kubernetes). We evolved PhotonPlatform into VMware Kubernetes Engine/CloudPKS a SaaS offering providing customers with managed AWS and Azure accounts to deploy fully managed Kubernetes clusters. One of my main contribution was to move the org to a continuous deployment model that was able to increase feature velocity and cut down on deployment related outages.

Management

• VMware - At VMware I made the transition to management, at that time I was already leading a team of two engineers which I grew to four owning API, CLI, a global cache, AWS/Azure account management, and continuous deployment, and also dotted line managed the UI team for the VMware Kubernetes Engine / CloudPKS SaaS offering. Once VMware acquired Heptio we ramped down efforts on CloudPKS and started working on a new product Tanzu Mission Control. Instead of controlling the cloud accounts K8s clusters are deployed to we set out to manage any K8s cluster. In responsibilities my team dropped ownership of continues deployment and the UI team, and instead expanded the global cache to owning all data storage and data pipelines and in addition to account management we owned onboarding, metering, and authentication. The team also grew from the original four engineers to eight engineers.
• Google - After six years at VMware I made the switch to Google. I joined UFO, the org that is ensuring Google data centers never run out of capacity. I took over a team of seven that is integrating robots into the workflows that we use to operate and maintain our data centers. Surprisingly running a data center is very similar to running a warehouse and much to my surprise I reconnected with a lot of ex colleagues that worked in the warehouse space at Amazon.

Since this post is going to be outdated soon enough, for a more up to date view of what I have been up to please see my LinkedIn profile.