I was updating my LinkedIn profile today1 and, after finishing my new write-up for EMC Isilon, noticed that I was drastically over their character limit. I’ve pared it down but thought I’d post the whole thing here since I went to all the effort of writing it to begin with!
1 No, I am not looking for a new job. I just got an itch to update the thing.
I’ve worn many hats so far in my short time at EMC Isilon: performance tester, performance team lead, platforms test lead, and DevOps architect.
Right now I’m leading four teams who together are reinventing how we build OneFS within Isilon engineering. We’re moving to a DevOps model leveraging continuous integration for more timely, focused feedback to developers on the state of their code. I’m personally responsible for the overall architecture of this new system and ensuring that the four teams (Infrastructure as a Service, Test as as Service, Build as a Service, and the Orchestration layer) are all integrating together. I’m the single point of contact for the Engineering organization, both out to my peers and up to management, on the state of the project. I’m also a technical consultant for the Infrastructure as a Service team since I have deep knowledge about the OneFS product as well as our internal infrastructure.
Prior to being a DevOps architect, I was the test team lead for the platforms team as they undertook upgrading the FreeBSD version that OneFS is based off of. This included creating and driving test plans, working with development on how to enable testability from day one, breaking work into smaller pieces for distribution to other team members, and interviewing potential team candidates. The thing I’m most proud of is creating tooling to enable testing of code from development before it could be plugged into the existing infrastructure. This enabled testing of code from before the first code commit to catch code regressions early.
Before the platforms team I worked with the overall performance team. This included all aspects of Isilon product performance (development, test, benchmarking, and support) across all product functional areas (kernel, networking, filesystem, and protocols). During the implementation of the Endurant Cache, one highly respected developer gave me the title of Performance Test Ninja which I’ve gladly kept to this day (’cause come on — it’s a cool title!). I was a team lead and contributor on the creation of the Performance BVT — an extensible performance test suite for automatic performance evaluation to ensure no performance regressions from build-to-build. Passing the PerfBVT (as it is affectionately known) is part of the merge criteria for feature branches before they merge the main code repo. The PerfBVT has caught several major performance regressions before they were ever merged.
Throughout my time at EMC Isilon I’ve reported to the test organization which gives me free reign to have insane focus on quality. I’ve not lost my technical chops either as I’ve muddled around in the FreeBSD TCP stack when troubleshooting 10GigE performance, slogged through kernel traces, and identified code bottlenecks (before tossing the bug to development to fix).
Outside of my “day job” mentioned above, I also have a passion for recruiting, diversity, and training. I’ve given tech talks at colleges, regularly participate in interviews for positions throughout engineering, give Engineering 101 classes for new hires, I’ve been a mentor of Ada Development Academy interns, represented EMC Isilon at GeekGirlCon and the Out & Equal Career Fair, and was on the formative board of the EMC LGBT West Coast employee resource group.
Digital Ramblings 