MAX Train

The new mission, or as some may call it, a job! The context for those that might not be familiar with my adventures is that I’ve been working independently as a consultant, contractor, community builder, beer drinker, hacker, teacher, trainer, mentor, curriculum builder, and training content creator. The last time I held something that resembled a job was 560 business days ago, or more specifically 816 days ago. Honestly, I’m not even sure that it could be considered a job, it was a strange gig to say the least. Recently after this long break I’m taking up a new job position with some interesting objectives and priorities.

Here’s some of what I wrote to outline the specific objectives and priorities for the new team I’m joining and to insure I had clear priorities for myself. I do, after all, prize clear objectives very high on the “things that are useful & cool“ list.

Objectives

  • Community Contributions - Help launch and build the community around the release of a yet to be announced open source micro-services framework (we’re currently calling it the Forge Framework) following an open source software model. I’ll also be telling you about all the work that has gone into this framework so far form Jesse, Beau, and the team. This will cover their various battles, from discussions to decisions, all leading up to the release of the framework. At this point, our time frame to release this is somewhere around the Feburary time frame. Currently it is in production, but we will need to make sure we have a reason repository of code we can release. We’re aiming for it to be in good shape for everybody to use when it’s released. (I’ll be managing the overall effort, so ping me if you’re interested in jumping into the project)
  • Site Reliability - Help build infrastructure for site reliability, deployment, etc (immutable, container based, etc) to deliver the company’s key products, APIs, micro-services, and improve the back-end deployment and delivery options and capabilities. This is going to include a lot of cool technology including things like Docker, kafka, CoreCLR, and a host of other things that I’ll be blogging about on a regular basis. Along with this infrastructure and site reliability I’ll help set guidelines, approaches, and future objectives for delivery and deployment of software. When I implement things, I’ll aim to blog it, when I learn new tips and tricks, I’ll aim to blog it, and whenever I break a build, I’ll blog that too. Whatever it is, I’m aiming to increase my frequency a great deal in the coming days, weeks, and months.
  • Talent Recon - I’m looking for, scouting around like force recon, and connecting talent to future work we will be having come open in early 2016. (Again, this is where I get to come and hack with you, help build awesome open source software, and let you my fellow coding cohort know about the company’s existing and upcoming awesome work we’ll be hiring for! For those that know me, you know I’m serious about making sure I line up the right people with the right types of gigs, I’m no recruiter, I’m a coder, so I fight against wildly innappropriate misalignment and related silliness!)

These are my top priorities as I step into this role with the Quote Center, a kind of laboratory of inventive ideas for Home Depot. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this in the coming days, and if you’re interested in working with me and an awesome group of people - reach out and let me know @Adron on Twitter or just email me. Cheers!