About DeployResponsibly

My official title is Cloud Platform Engineer. In theory, that means I build out “the cloud” so application teams can deploy their workloads safely and easily. That’s true, but most of my day-to-day is spent waiting on other teams (Entra, networking, firewall, DNS) to process my requests so I can actually do my work.

I got into cloud engineering through a complete career switch around 2022. I spent 4 years in the military and then 10 years in public safety, and in 2021 I decided I wanted out. I finished a bachelor’s degree in IT, with a focus on cloud engineering, online while working the night shift, and in 2022 I landed a Cloud Support Associate internship with AWS. They hired me on for the summer, then offered me a full-time spot that fall. I took it and joined the RDS team, supporting Postgres and Oracle.

New-hire training was beyond subpar, and that’s me being polite. I said as much in my exit feedback, and I hear they’ve improved it since, which is fantastic. After about 11 months I was tired of feeling like I didn’t know what I was doing, and tired of telling customers their Postgres major version upgrade failed because they skipped a step in the docs. So I quit. Just before that, I’d found a temporary full-time position at another company, in a program that rotates you through three different IT lines of business for six months each. My first rotation was with their Cloud Center of Excellence. I enjoyed it so much, and did well enough, that they opened a permanent position for me. That’s where I still am.

These days the work is platform-level engineering: private connectivity (Direct Connect and ExpressRoute), bootstrapping landing zones, and helping application teams when they get stuck on something they haven’t done before. I’m also the unofficial evangelist for Kubernetes, containers, and Go, trying to modernize how we build things, one “have you considered…?” at a time.

This site exists for two reasons:

1. I’ve been meaning to document the things that interest me and the little projects I work on. I also rarely finish my home projects, so I’m hoping this keeps me accountable.
2. Like I said, my day job involves a lot of waiting on the blockers every enterprise introduces in the name of security and governance. This blog and its projects let me just build. I enjoy building things.

Expect half-finished experiments, honest write-ups, and the constant occasional rant about firewall tickets. I hope you find something useful or interesting here.