Having started my tech professional journey in Silicon Valley right at the start of The Great Recession in June 2009, I joined Cisco systems because I enjoy computer networking as a new grad software engineer. There, I worked on the Security Applications team in the Security Technologies Business Unit (STBU) writing Python code which aggregated data from the Internet to improve the quality of Spam filter systems for the ESA, or Email Security Appliance. My manager was moving to Austin to integrate with a new team, and Shannon and I moved to Austin with hope of being able to afford a home there instead. The team wrote the network operating system for the IPS, writing C/C++ code for the network operating system.

Cisco Systems has been long known for its high quality of code, and its robustness. Many years will pass by, and the Cisco router will still be running without ever having to reboot the system, including an upgrade to new operating systems. As such, there was little room for improvement or innovation on the team, and the about the only thing left for many of the junior engineers was to tackle the extremely obscure or quite odd, very hard to reproduce software defects, which took upwards of weeks to prepare a developer environment, find a reproducible case, test for the defect, write the fix, test the fix, and commit the fix to all of the affected releases. Releases and innovation came slow because of the extremely high risk of any potential changes in the system. While at Cisco, I started a book club, and studied the materials for the CCNA (Cisco Certified Networking Associate) exam, but decided against taking the exam. While at Cisco, I also began to appreciate Python for its speed of development, and the cleanliness of the code due to Python enforcing readability inside of the compiler. While at Cisco, I am proud of my work on the Domain Generation Algorithm for one of the Conficker worm variants, and automating installation of dev images on IPS systems to increase development speed.

Key takeaways:

1. If you lack a software testing culture, the only way a junior engineer can stop fixing bugs all day is by fixing all of the bugs made by the senior engineers faster than the senior engineers make the bugs. If you end up trying to cut corners by not writing tests for your code, your team will hate their life.
2. The separation of developer, QA, and production operations created a void in knowledge. A complete lack of ignorance on what is important or what is the correct priorities. Breaking down the corporate silos is the best way to make teams effective at their jobs.
3. Python rocks

Box

As he began looking for new opportunities in the startup space, he found a position at a little known startup called Box.net (now Box) in Palo Alto, CA. There, he worked as an Infrastructure Programmer (their internal name for Devops before it even had a name). Attached to the Technical Operations team, Chad was responsible for writing many scripts (even a Linux man page!) to help the Technical Operations team solve problems programmatically instead of through brute forcing or manual fixes. One project he is proud of is getting two OpenTSDB clusters up an running at Box.

Key takeaways:

1. Never grow greater than 100% in one year.
2. Take care of your employees through good snacks/free lunch
3. Do not build an ivory tower on top of a loose foundation
4. Although they are a lot of work and zero sleep, Hackathons are fun

After Box, Chad joined Gigwalk, which at the time was a Task Rabbit competitor, but Gigwalk has since pivoted to a new space. Joining at a tumultuous time period, one in which the founder and CEO was removed, and at only a dozen employees, was something to be remembered. He worked on backend, AWS infrastructure, and front end projects while there. He is proud of his k-means clustering algorithm that was used to bunch thousands of gigs across the United States in batches based upon geography.

Key takeaways:

1. Terrible management comes from Yahoo! - never hire anyone with Yahoo! on their resume.
2. Monitor your attrition rates amongst the teams. If the attrition rate gets above 20%, the manager in charge of them should be fired.
3. If the manager is happy or jovial about a team member leaving, that manager should be fired.

After Gigwalk, a recent announcement was made of a new startup that was just launched by Ev Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter: Medium. After reading an article about (paraphrasing) "Facebook is OK, Twitter is helping, but Medium is going to change the world", he became fascinated by the potential that Medium was providing everyone to write elegant and thoughtful pieces on the Internet, without requiring the typical CMS blog setup that Wordpress or other sites at the time required.

Joining Medium was the best decision that Chad made in his career. Through that, he was able to learn about many of the nuances of performing engineering at a very high level with many seasoned startup veterans at an extremely fast pace. Having Medium run as a Holacracy made Medium run fast, and make every engineer extremely flexible with their work, which made the company extremely efficient. A huge supporter of Holacracy, Chad was able to become very seasoned in a wealth of challenging engineering opportunities and hold many leadership roles amongst the Engineering team. Alas, all great things must come to an end.

On Jan 4, Medium laid off about one third of its staff in a new pivot, meant to remove the focus from the publications and more towards the individual writers. Many articles were written about the speculation on where Medium is headed. Fortune, Business Insider had some thoughts on Ev's announcement on the layoff situation.

I feel quite torn about the announcement and what it means for the future of Medium. On one hand, the pivot is something back to what was originally intended, and it is the reason that I joined Medium. More often than not, companies sell out, and forget their focus. On the other hand, it disappoints me that we had to go so far down one direction to come back to where we started. 2016 was the year of Publications for Medium. It was a huge focus of the company. We launched an external API, a Wordpress plugin, SDKs for Golang, Python, Node, and even launched an in-product feature that allowed individuals to migrate their Wordpress stories to Medium using the Wordpress export feature. I even moved to and started managing a new team: Publisher Solutions Engineering team. Our task was to manage, update, and support the API, Wordpress plugin, SDKs, and migrate all of the publications over to Medium.

I performed many tasks related to Medium. Provisioning laptops and administering laptops using JAMF, deploying and administering Jenkins CI clusters, design the infrastructure for the migration from Monolith to micro services architecture, Datadog, managing the on-call escalation team, Clusterrunner, added Golang support to Pants build system, studied and practiced Holacracy and meditation while at Medium. As a technical leader and manager of teams, it was always more important to make others productive, and I enjoyed doing that.

Key takeaways:

1. Give any engineer the chance to show them what they are made of, and they will impress.
2. Give guidelines and guard rails to engineers instead of deadlines and priorities.
3. When it comes to technologies or how the business operates, try everything you know of or have heard about.
4. Whatever you try needs to be safe to try for the organization. If it is safe to try, start working on it!
5. Micro-service architectures and double-edged swords: provides you the ability to try new technologies at the expense of the operators maintaining the service.
6. The Developers in an engineering team are for writing code and pushing out their code. The Operations (or Devops) team is for making sure that the developers can safely, reliably, and quickly write and deploy new software and accomplish the needs of the business.
7. Distributed authority systems (such as Holacracy) make the team move extremely fast that even the engineers might become a little uneasy at the pace.
8. With a talented group of individuals, don't fight what they want: give them everything they need to be successful, even if that means giving them a $350 ergonomic keyboard.
9. Provide a voice to those without a voice by asking them questions and giving them a forum to raise concerns, thoughts, and ideas.
10. Extreme focus on the few things that matter for the business is the only way to survive, until you have a cashcow to explore new ideas.

One of the failed promises of technology is the mobile work myth. As long as you are connected to the Internet, you can work! This was the new promise of the Internet and one of the great fears that stemmed from the idea that if you work on a computer, and you have access to the Internet, you can work anywhere and connect over the Internet.

Poplar was the idea of what would it take to create a new job in a new area that was truly remote? For many personal reasons, working remotely is not only my desire, but it needed to happen immediately. I couldn't find a job in my hometown of Wausau, WI using my skillsets, and I desperately needed a way to get back home. Yes, I could have went home and live with the parents. I am not talking about that. I am talking about self sustainment of a family is what I was looking for. And all the jobs are gone back home.

In the end, I tried two things:

1. Learn Swift and iOS development with a friend I had met at Medium
2. Rent out a truck and camper on Airbnb at various locations

In the end, both turned out to fail. The friend who I was working with on the iOS app ditched me because I was working too hard on the Airbnb work, and for three weeks, I did not reach out to him. He was upset at this fact, and had been convinced that I had lost hope. The Airbnb rentals worked well until about May, when I realized I didn't have a "special sue permit" required to operate in the Coconino National Forest just outside the Grand Canyon, and all of the permits were used up for the year. It is not my last venture, just was a bump in the road.

After cancelling almost $10K in Airbnb bookings, I was devastated to say the least. Within twenty-four hours, I had left the Grand Canyon, and headed towards Seattle to start the interview process. On my way, I passed by the Four Corners, which is the homepage photo you see on the front page.

I joined StreetShares as a Senior DevOps Engineer, the first DevOps Engineer. The whole Engineering team was a team of five (including me!). I made many improvements to the tooling and infrastructure right out of the gate. I was able to get a reliable deployment system setup in AWS using CodeBuild and CodeDeploy. I was able to get the deployments into the hands of the Developers so that they could deploy their code to Production. Soon after I joined, the VP of Product and Technology left, and there was a gap in leadership. A new CTO was hired, and I was promoted to be the Director of Engineering. I managed people half of the time, and the other half of the time I was hands-on implementing technologies. I started using Ansible at StreetShares for Infrastructure as Code. I migrated our codebase from Angular1 to React. I migrated us from EC2 instances to Kubernetes. I setup a Staging environment and a QA environment in addition to the already existing Production environment. In addition, I did the performance management for all of the engineers, the mentorship for engineers, and participated in design discussions. Between the CTO and myself we had a good relationship: he set out the vision for what he would like, we would have a discussion about the merits of the approach, and then I would implement the vision that we set forth to do.

In March 2020, when COVID hit, and everyone went home to never return to the office, our business was in a critical point. Our business was to make small business loans, and nobody was taking small business loans. Everyone was taking PPP loans. We decided to pivot our entire business overnight, in one phone call, rather than to shutdown. We then served both PPP and LF loans to our clients which helped assist in the massive onslaught of PPP Loan requests that they had. It was hard work. Many 18-hour days. Many 100+ hour weeks. In the end, we were successful.

In April 2022, StreetShares was acquired by MeridianLink. I led the technology and intregration of the StreetShares technology into MeridianLink. It took 15 months to complete all of the required items, and I am proud of the team that we had to work through PPP, LF, the acquisition, and the integration. It has been a roller coaster!

At MeridianLink, I am the Senior Manager of Platform Engineering. I collaborated with our team and we came up with a Team Charter. Our mission is “to make it easier for developers to develop, build, test, and deploy the code”. I am certain there will be many opportunities and new stories as the MeridianLink story unfolds in time.