Hi there! I'm James.
First off, you should know this isn’t a professional blog by any means. It’s purpose serves as a journal of sorts for my educational journey. Some articles are how-to’s; some you could consider professional. But all are opinionated. So feel free to correct me if I’m wrong (thats what this is all about), or just give me feedback. So, with that out of the way, a little about me:
I could say I started my career as a musician at 18, and I quickly found may way to teaching music. I did that until I was 24. Even during that time, my passion for computers was around. Constantly exploring new worlds and automating away my daily tasks. Even then I owned my domain name and hosted a website (built by one of those website creation services). But what really opened a new world was working at MailChimp. There I discovered the true depths of a Tech Company. What teams existed, what roles they played in a SaaS company; but more importantly how to communicate, how to work with speed and accuracy in stressful situations, and how to cultivate a creative and driven culture. While I was there, one my peers introducted me to front-end development. He gave me some pointers, so I began studying UI/UX practices. I worked on a few projects during that time, but nothing really stuck. And I lost my drive to develop. Looking back, it may have been the syntax that scared me.
After MailChimp, I went on an offroad-based roadtrip across the US (east coast to west coast and back) while “camping” in a Jeep Cherokee with a custom-built bedframe in the back. During that time, I had a friend that had landed a job as an SRE. He was talking to me about the work, but I didn’t truly understand what it was. So he pointed me over to two docs: Linode’s Beginner’s Guide and Setting Up and Securing a Compute Instance and told me to get to work. And that sparked the journey.
It took me about a year to feel anywhere near comfortable before I applied for jobs. Then that same friend recommended me to an “outsourced DevOps” company called OpSourced. We built infrastructure using IAC inside your preferred cloud provider and boy did we touch every bit of it, from the CDN all the way down to whatever was running the customer’s application (app/web server, docker container, kube pod). Working this job was my bootcamp. Not only did I get to learn significant amounts about cloud providers and managing Linux based machines at scale, but this provided me the ability to see production quality infrastructure on a smalller, digestable scale.
Today I find myself focused on expounding on the tools I learned there through building the infrastructure to support the projects I love. With a focus on productivity, I try to provide each team the means to achieve their development goals as efficiently as possible. And using those skills I picked up as a music teacher, I put special attention on helping to educate team members on best practices (in-person and through documentation), and proper implementations of production level infrastructure.
It’s been quite the journey so far, and it’s just begun! If you’d like to know more about me, my personal blog is a great place to start; though I may ramble about music from time to time.
If you’re looking for a more professional approach, check out my Gitea repos, as well as my resume.
I’d love to hear from you! I’m interested in collaborations and open source projects. Thoughts on one of my blog posts? Need the infrastructure to help support a project? Have an interesting work opportunity? Want to know more about my life as an engineer and guitarist? Drop me a line anytime: blog@jameslavender.com I’m not always near my computer, as sometimes I find myself in nature, but I’ll reply as soon as I’m back.