As stated in my announcement post - after 7~ years, I resigned from Infoxchange several months ago.

I planned on taking a holiday, relaxing, decompressing, dipping my toes in some off-the-shelf tech I haven’t spent a lot of time with and performing some personal growth through reading a number of books that have been sitting on my ’to read’ shelf.

This is exactly what I’ve done.

I’m now open to new opportunities

I’d rather find a workplace that I can add great value too and be happy to work with than rush into a new role quickly, obviously if something great turns up right away - I’ll pursue it.

Considerations

  • What value will I bring to the organisation?
  • What gaps or new ventures is the organisation looking to hire for?
  • What might I learn while working?
  • What is the team structure I’d be joining (if any)?
  • What technologies will I likely be working with?
  • What tooling will I be required to use?
  • Will I have fun (at least some of the time)?
  • Will I have a reasonable amount of creative freedom in my work?
  • How much bureaucracy will surround the role I’m in?

My Resume / CV

These days I’m generally using my LinkedIn as a living Resume / CV.

My LinkedIn is also the best place to contact me regarding potential positions.

A message to recruiters

As soon as I changed my status to ‘Open to new job opportunities.’ I’ve been swamped with messages on LinkedIn and email.

If you have a potential role for me, I’ve come up with a basic list of things I’d like to know before having a formal chat.

It would be greatly helpful (for both of us) if you could please send through some information about the position including:

  • Role(s) and Responsibilities.
  • Team size.
  • Internal team and company values.
  • Example of what a day / week or month might look like in the position (might be hard I know).
  • ‘Must have’ experience.
  • ‘Highly desired’ experience.
  • ‘Nice to have’ experience.
  • Salary range.
  • Office location and parking (e.g. CBD - no parking but close to major train station, Inner-suburb - Company car parking, Outer-suburb - on street parking).

If you can’t answer some of those, no problem - I’m just working on this as an initial template to get a handle on the offers coming through.

Clarification on some common role titles and experience terms

Please see my blog post - ‘Stop trying to hire with titles like ‘DevOps Engineer’ or Cloud Engineer’

  • On ‘DevOps’ in a title:

Often when I see this, the organisation is really wanting / asking for a Senior Developer with some minor Operations experience - if so - that’s not me.

I’ve worked very closely with Developers and Testers over the years, but I am skilled in platform and pipeline engineering, automation, highly-available service engineering, distributed systems engineering, platform and service performance engineering and operations team leadership.

  • On term ‘Cloud Experience’:

Cloud, for me at least - means outsourced Infrastructure and Service / Service Endpoints.

I’ve spent many years building private clouds, (mostly based on Xen Cloud Platform, XenServer Cloud, XCP-ng and KVM systems) and building out reliable, cloud-native, scalable and highly redundant services that are presented and endpoints to developers, testers or businesses directly - essentially I’ve been ‘building private Clouds’ more than I have been using ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions like AWS or GCP.

However, I have dipped my toes in each and completed some AWS training, at the end of the day I found that it’s just a change of tooling and for me - that’s not a problem.

However if you’re looking for someone that’s only worked on AWS and knows all the AWS offerings inside-and-out already - that’s not me, I can or will be that person - but haven’t had the need to pivot as of yet.

What I’ve been upto (since Infoxchange)

  • Took a 10 day holiday in Fiji, lying on the beaches, reading, decompressing and enjoying the sunshine and chatting with the locals.
  • A lot of reading and research (Pitch Anything, Getting to Yes, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind).
  • Skimmed through several AWS Practitioner and Best Practise Architecture guides (As mentioned, I’ve always designed and run cloud platforms - but not made heavy use other ‘off the shelf’ options).
  • Completed the Amazon AWS Practitioner Essentials training.
  • Caught up with fellow platform, automation engineers as well as people I see as mentors.
  • Visited a few meetups.