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Where have I been? (and where am I going)


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I took a much longer break in blogging, podcasting and videocasting than I originally anticipated.  Of course, the world pandemic extended it a bit further when Covid-19 changed how we work.  Let me back up toward the end of 2018.

Blog is warming Back Up

After 20 years at Connectria, it was time to take a sabbatical and relax the mind.  I took six months to travel, rest, reflect and look ahead.  In April of 2019 I landed at a great match.  Just when I started looking, a company started looking for someone to fill a unique slot.  The position blended messaging, cloud, API, governance, and layers of types of management skills. I was the manager, SME, pseudo architect, program manager, product manager and part time engineer on areas I had long time skills in (like SMTP, SMS and cloud scale).

I played a role with multiple hats.  As the Senior Manager, I had an outstanding team of engineers I managed to architect, build and deploy a serverless and stateless cloud based solution.  The entire platform needed to be scalable on demand, following numerous global privacy policies (PII, GDPR, CCPA, PCI and others) while being served via a secure API gateway based on Kong.  The messages being sent across the platform would be SMS and email with two-way communication automation built in.  Tens of millions of messages would transverse the platform monthly. Success was had months ahead of schedule. Testing was just about to begin in production.

Then Covid-19 hit and the furloughs started. The platform had to go live immediately. With the flip of a switch (not really but pretend someone did) the SMS was put into action and my team was put into furlough, then dismissed when they knew 2019 would not see any recovery.  The second half of 2020 can be summarized as learning Google Cloud Platform on my own to get my certificate in GCP and the hunt for the next adventure.

Enter into 2021 and the next posting in a few days time will be the announcement where I landed.....