Professional Journey
TLDR
The story
Each job posed it's own challenges and constraints, but my goal was to focus on underlying technologies as opposed to the processes. With that mission in mind, it has helped me get to a point that I feel stable and fulfilled professionally. I don't know if I would enjoy doing anything else.
The majority of my professional experience has been with Centage, but before that I was a top performer as a Consultation Agent at Geek Squad. KPIs were based on selling services and I knew it wasn't the place for me so I looked elsewhere. Thankfully I had completed a college certificate and with strong soft-skills I was able to join Centage as a Technical Support Specialist. I started in the server closet working through a stack of reclaimed hardware while juggling clients calling in for application support. Always something to learn or keep you busy!
Part of Centage's solution was integrating with a variety of on-prem databases and there was a need for someone to focus on this. I worked closely with the principal developer of the in-house ELT tool where I learned an immense amount about SQL Server and data integration concepts. This was the the catalyst to start the Integration Team specializing in data ingress to Centage. Our main focus was how quickly could we not only connect to these source systems, but ensure the structure and financials meets the business requirements.
I had take classes, done online learnings, workshops, but now I was responsible for building end to end processes from source to Centage. We had the in-house integration tool, but we needed a way of integrating even more systems without needing C# / .NET developers. After weeks of review we settled on Oracle Data Integrator as the next tool to expand the capabilities of the integration team. This was a greenfield endeavor, there were no playbook for this other than a 400+ page Oracle® Fusion Middleware Developing Integration Projects with Oracle Data Integrator. We needed to build an approach to support the wide variety of sources Centage already integrated with and expand them. The beginning was rough, but as I learned through experimentation and being incredibly flexible, we started picking up momentum.
I built GL specific templates and setup scripting to allow us to very quickly install and configure ODI for our use case. As we grew we knew we would need to eventually move away from ODI, but this gave us a standard interface to deal with database, file, and API sources. We were a small but mighty team focused on not only solving todays challenges, but also on individual growth. We worked closely with Customer Support and most of the team grew organically from there.
While the work was satisfying, role of DevOps became available and I jumped at the opportunity seeing how it took concepts I was doing but then applied it at a much broader scale. The position allowed me to dive into working with Python, IaC (Terraform), Configuration Management (Ansible), Kubernetes, and be responsible for production infrastructure. Things that I would touch on during integration, but now there was a rubric to follow. Automation is king!
Within DevOps I excelled, building out scripts & automation to solve a variety of issues or perform tasks that would otherwise be done manually. Along with being the Identity Admin, many projects surrounded the AWS APIs and interacting with Ansible or Python to invoke changes within AWS. I introduced the use of the Atlas CLI within Jenkins jobs to automate cluster operations as a cost saving measure to reduce Atlas spend.
One major project was the planning and implementation of Nginx to operate as a reverse proxy for SSAS over HTTPS. This required a deep understanding of networking concepts & security, AWS Services, SQL Server & Analysis Services, and MongoDB in order to implement. It was a multi-stage process, that required changing the dataflow, new SQL Servers, Ansible Playbooks, Powershell scripting for DB migrations, and a ton of research to ensure no edge cases were missed. This work enabled the company to add additional reporting infrastructure and enable load balancing of clients between servers without disruption.
