About

All about me I suppose.

I am Irish, originally from Dublin, small village called Killiney. Grew up there always out on my bike and roaming the local park and climbing tress and wishing that the Goonies was real. No such luck!

Been living abroad for the past few years. What started off as a little trip to South America before taking up a visa in Canada got a bit out of hand and I spent the best part of a year and a half traveling from the Caribbean coast of Colombia right to the southern tip of Tierra Del Fuego. I fell in love with this part of the world and after a year living in Canada decided it was time to return down south and I am currently residing in Buenos Aires Argentina.

I have a bit of a strange background in that after leaving school I studied history, with a focus on the early medieval period. Never mind GOT I was into this stuff way before it was cool, pity nobody listened to me back then. I focused on the Vikings and wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Viking invasions of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms

I went on to study archaeology, again specialising on the early medieval period and the Vikings but this time with focus on the impact the Vikings had on urbanization in Ireland. I worked as field archaeologist for a few years and ended up working in the Office of Public Works, a government body in Ireland that amongst other things looks after historic structures. I was lucky enough to work on some really great projects in Dublin Castle, Kilmainham Gaol (well the courthouse) and the Four Courts. I really enjoyed this as it meant I got to poke around old buildings, get into spaces nobody normally gets to see.

But whats all this got to do with DevOps you say. Well after a number of years I returned to study a masters in Interactive digital media, hoping to harness the power of technology with my background in the arts. But it just turned into me undertaking a fully fledged career in IT.I started off in technical support or a small Irish software development company. It was a great experience as I got to implement ticketing software, migrate systems to the cloud, AWS and start on my DevOps journey.

In those years I had not heard of DevOps but looking back I was going down that route. I was trying to automate everything and anything. Setting up monitoring and alerting so that the company went from reactive to proactive. Self healing and automating our testing so we could focus on addressing new issues rather than going over the same old issues. As it was a small company I was given a long leash but the boss and as he put it I was very fly by the seat of my pants. Both a good and a bad thing in the world of IT.

Then I left for my travels but ended up working for a large cloud MSP in Canada and got different experience. A lot more process driven and it was a good experience to see how larger organizations functioned but it was funny as the same problems were there, too much manual toil and reacting instead of proactive feedback loops to the development side of the business. After about a ear I decided it was back to Argentina with me.

So here I am and I have managed to land myself an actual Devops role for a multinational company on a pretty interesting project. Its fairly mature and smarter men than I have implemented most of the system and supporting structure already. This is good as it means I can learn new tools and not have to fuss to much about things breaking.

Well that role lasted about a year and unfortunately due to the pandemic the client pulled the project in house or outsourced to some cheaper option perhaps. I ended up working with a cloud native shop that I learned a ton. DevOps on demand was the name of the game and was lucky to have some long running projects. Kubernetes, Helm, CI/CD, observability, Terraform. Really learned a lot and looking back it was a great experience even if I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have at the time due to the workload.

Then Google came a knocking and well I had wanted to work there for quite some time, the home of SRE and Borg, Kubernetes essentially. A Cloud Infrastructure Architect no less, always moving up in the world. Was an interesting time, I thought all things cloud native and containers but the client base of GCP and the projects that made it my way were often legacy so a lot of on-prem connectivity and building landing zones in GCP but it helped to up my game in terms of networking. After a little while I was able to become the lead architect in a GKE pod. We specialized in migrating Kubernetes workloads to GCP and that threw in many an interesting project, don’t think I had a single standard project in all my time there and my managers always said you can handle the weird ones better than most other folks, which is a compliment I suppose but it didn’t half get a bit confusing at times. GKE windows node pools running into issues with ContainerD, not even some of the GKE product folks knew about some of the issues we ran into!! I also managed to get a few certs in GCP and HashiCorp’s Terraform one as well so a great learning experience and met a few solid folks along the way in the corporate sphere that is Google, its not all beanbags and chilling but a sight more like Office space than people would think!

Ah yes I’m pretty obsessed with Raspberry Pi’s. They have been one of the best teachers I have had and throughout the years I’ve learned so much (if not nearly everything) that has allowed my career to progress as it has. Its all well and good learning on the job but for me I learn the most when I am messing with my beloved Pi’s and can be quit militant about them. Don’t get me wrong I love Arduino and the host of other micro computers/boards out there but the Pi has a special lace for me.

The point of the blog is just to put out my musings on various things, mostly technology and a home monitoring project I have undertaken that will take in DevOps practices where possible, a little bit of serverless, IoT and a few more areas. If I haven’t bored you to death already, enjoy and welcome to the world of tomorrow!