Bio

Developing an interest in computers at a young age, I started writing my first BASIC programs at around the age of nine, and remember the Internet when it was all still text.

I eventually turned my hobby into a career, initially foregoing college in order to do network security work for the Department of Energy. My punk rock roots never really let me feel comfortable working for the government, so after a few years I left to pursue an education where I studied philosophy and history at Virginia Commonwealth University.

A whirlwind of circumstances landed me in NYC many years later, where I returned to working with computers. After several years helping a small MSP grow, I joined Admeld as a Technical Operations Engineer, only to find myself employed by Google a few months later due to acquisition.

At Google I was first introduced to the concept of Site Reliability Engineering, a discipline that so immediately connected with me, I almost wondered how I ever did anything else.

My time at Google allowed me to learn from some of the most brilliant engineers in the field. Eventually, I found my other calling as an educator and speaker as I travelled all over the world training other Site Reliability Engineers, and was one of the primary developers of the Google IT Professional Certification program.

Eventually I joined the Customer Reliability Engineering team, a group of carefully-selected SRE tasked with teaching Google’s largest cloud customers “how to SRE”, and helped contribute multiple chapters to The Site Reliability Workbook (O’Reilly 2018).

More recently I spent time at Squarespace, where my focus was on spreading the concepts of SLO-based approaches to service reliability — both internally and across the industry, by speaking at conferences around the globe and writing Implementing Service Level Objectives (O’Reilly Media).

Today I am the Principal Reliability Advocate at Nobl9, looking to help bring SLO tooling and education to everyone in tech in the most efficient and reliable manner possible.

When not sharing my passion for technology with others, you can find me scuba diving or watching college basketball. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with my partner Jen and a rescue dog named Taco.