Bear's Log

Often life gets very busy and the time goes by until you suddenly realize that it's been a few months (years) since you last posted anything meaningful to the blog...

At CircleCI we grew the company and the Engineering division tremendiously, which included growing the SRE team - this meant I had to switch from being a Manager to being a Hiring Manager, a new role. It also meant that I was helping with the hiring for Engineering, Security and other teams. Oh and did I mention that this was across multiple time zones and in different countries :)

While that was going on we also were expanding the services, deploying to production the latest CircleCI code base which meant learning and using Kubernetes, Helm, Mongo, Postgres, RabbitMQ and many other tools. Some were new, some old - all of them updated and learned.

With a growing company you often run into issues from the growth, and we definitely did - but the people first focus at CircleCI meant that we were able to identify and plan for them. Part of that plan was to hire a VP of Platform as it became obvious to the management team that Engineering really needed to be split into the Product / Application group and a group responsible for the infrastructure Did you know that hiring a VP is very process oriented? Yea, it's intense and a glimpse I was glad to be a part of and I was also glad the company let SRE be a part of the selection as the new VP was going to be our new boss :)

Oh, and during all of the above we also were finishing our FedRAMP review and starting to plan for SOC2 - yikes! I also realized that there are better people than I for management and have moved back to being an Engineer and stopped being a Manager.

So yea, it's been a very busy 2 years. Don't even get me started on 2020 and the chaos bomb that is Covid - UGH