That time has covered railways and transportation infrastructure, oil and gas, local government, criminal justice, DoD-cleared research computing, and higher education. Different industries, same underlying problem: somebody has to make the systems work, keep them secure, and keep the people running them from burning out.
Today I’m Associate Director of Research Infrastructure Technology at CU Boulder Research Computing, where my team runs high-performance computing clusters, a multi-petabyte research storage platform, and the condo cluster program that campus research groups buy into. That means GPU fleets and liquid cooling and Slurm scheduling. It also means sprint planning, compliance evidence, and figuring out how a handful of people cover systems that used to depend on one.
I’ve sat in every seat on an agile team, which is most of why I write about it the way I do. I started as a developer at a railroad research organization, writing code for a train braking program inside an agile process long before I ever ran one. Later I was a Scrum Master there. Then a Product Owner in oil and gas. I’m a Product Owner again today, for my own team’s backlog.
Individual contributor, Scrum Master, Product Owner. The view is genuinely different from each chair, and I don’t have much patience for arguments about agile that have only ever been made from one of them.
Along the way I’ve led multi-million dollar technology programs, built secure enclaves for federal compliance work, and served as co-PI on a National Science Foundation grant.
What I write about here is the part that doesn’t make it into conference slides. How infrastructure teams actually run. Where planning genuinely helps and where it’s theater. What it takes to get a data center ready before the hardware shows up. And why the best engineer on your team being irreplaceable is a problem, not an achievement.
I’m based in Colorado. I also run a small software company, Kandake Labs, building simple tools for people who need something to just work.
Everything I write here is my own view, not the University of Colorado’s.