Thanks to Hulki Okan Tabak for making this photo available freely on unsplash 🎁

What did I do this year?

Local Dev Containers (3/2025?)

Managed to containerize the compute (ec2) portions of our IaaS product, allowing our devs to develop not against the cloud, but on their locals via the container. The container hooks onto the preexisting database and infrastructure of an existing test deployment.

Docs site adoption (year-round)

Got buy-in from CTO/Product Owner on the usefulness of our internal documentation site. Developed a public version for clients to use. Democratized use of the site among the team by pointing to it when asked a question, to the point of record breaking. Hoping to see edits democratized in the coming year.

Support Hand-off to team via xMatters

Leveraged xMatters to generate a markdown calendar of support shift sent to our slack workspace every week, as well as some incident response integrations for our few enterprise-level clients. All can be additionally auto-triggered by slack emoji 😎

Comings and Goings

Managed onboarding of 2 permanent additions to the team (one of them family!), and three temporary additions. None of them seem to hate me, taking that positive sign as a smoke test that I'm at least likable.

Working Sessions

Established well-attended working sessions to talk tech, do demos or brown bags.

Kubernetifed our Product

To round out the year which began with containerization, I managed to kubernetify that compute portion of our product for that enterprise customer, complete with helm charts and a how-to.

This was a very successful year managing this team.

I'm grateful to work with some of my best friends.