I ♥ my Wife, Son, and 🐶

I put 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 over 💻

I listen to, collect, and archive 🎷 Live Music

I’m a budding gardener 🌱

I’m a hell of a technical marketer, datacenter architect, and systems designer. This is what currently pays the bills and will probably continue to do so for a little while.

Digging deeper

I care greatly about the people around me. That includes my family, friends, team mates, and my technical community. I work with people who want to grow their careers, to direct them in directions they may not have found on their own, make introductions, and mentor when needed. I believe if we spent more of our time focusing on the people who work in tech, rather than on the tech itself, we would have a happier, healthier, more inclusive, and more productive industry.

I always put my family over my career. I take breaks during my workday to spend time with my wife and son. I’ll often go for a long walk with my young son to clear my head and see the world through his eyes. I strive to be present in my life, although I don’t always succeed. There will always be more work to do and more capitalism to feed, but our days are numbered and our time with loved ones is far too short.

I am diagnosed and medicated ADHD, which I’ve known for decades but the social stigma and brainwashing I received growing up kept my parents and then me from pursuing diagnosis until my 30s.

I have an obscenely large live music collection. Before a catastrophic hard drive failure (hard drives don’t like to swim), I had just over 75TB of live music indexed and archived. I’m slowly building up my collection again, but I’m only allowing music into the collection once I’ve sanitized and cleaned the metadata, file names, etc. It’s a lot of manual work, but I’m also trying to build a management tool to help automate some of this for me.

Specializations

  • Technical Marketing
  • Datacenter and Mission Critical Application Architecture and Design
  • All the clouds, no matter their cloudiness
  • Sales Engineering and Solutions Architecture
  • Tying Business issues to technical solutions
  • AI, LLMs, ML (largely begrugingly)
  • Saying “No.” - it is a complete sentence after-all

Career

[Jan 2024 -> Current] Principal Technical Marketing Engineer @ Continuum

It’s a lot of everything, but I spend a large amount of time focusing on delievering content and assets for our customers, largely focused on Customer Experience and Product On-Board Satisfaction.

[Dec 2023 -> Current] Principal, Owner @ thewrkgroup

thewrkgroup is primarily focused on technical marketing consulting along with a number of other side projects and businesses. I’ve designed the company as a place for TMEs who either don’t have a home or are a bit bored to operate out of. We’re setup to provide all of the backend infrastructure they need to be successful.

[Apr 2023 -> Jan 2024] Principal Evangelist @ SingleStore

  • Deliver presentations at conferences
  • Develop content in many forms for our customers (video, blogs, code examples, etc)
  • Build Marketing Automation and Integration for internal use

[Nov 2021 -> Apr 2023] Senior Technical Marketing Engineer @ NVIDIA

  • Cover BlueField DPUs, specifically focusing on manageability and day two operations
  • Work on Project Monterey with peers at VMware
  • Improve documentation, automation, and orchestration
  • Improve storage use-cases and work with ISVs and partners

Key Projects

  • Project Monterey - A complete re-imagination of VMware Cloud Foundation Architecture using NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs. I am leading the way to have operational demos that enable customers to get hands on with Project Monterey.

[Aug 2021 -> Nov 2021] Manager, Technical Marketing @ Druva

  • Work with product teams to curate content and collateral for Phoenix and CloudRanger product lines
  • Presented on webinars with PMM counterparts
  • Pipeline between customers, PM, and engineering
  • Created compelling demo videos, blog posts, and other assets to accompany product feature releases

[Dec 2019 -> Aug 2021] Principal Technical Marketing Engineer @ Nutanix

  • Create and Manage technical content and Test Drive Experiences for Nutanix Objects and Mine products
  • Work closely with internal stakeholders: Engineering Leadership, Engineering/QA, Product Management, Marketing, and Sales Engineering
  • Work with external partners, analysts, and customers

Key Projects

  • Nutanix Test Drive - A highly immersive Test Drive experience for most of Nutanix’s enterprise software products. Greatly increased customer engagement with 10’s of thousands of test drives taken each year. Helped implement automation through Python and Calm to enable deployment and demos for many Nutanix products.
  • TME Tech Bytes - Worked closely with another team member to develop the TME Tech Bytes video series process and branding. Developed templates for videos with Nutanix Video team and helped create extensive documentaiton and tracking for production of the videos in our homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • The Nutanix Bible - Took over and re-designed The Nutanix Bible after the original author moved on from Nutanix. The Nutanix Bible has well over 10k views per month. The re-design, which launched June 2021, greatly sped up access to relevant information, increasse viewer retention, and make it easier for people to contribute future content.

[Apr 2015 -> Dec 2019] Senior Systems Engineer @ Nutanix

  • Apply architecture experience to ask the hard questions of business owners and technologists to ensure proper design requirements are documented and met
  • Design reliable and highly performant Nutanix Clusters to meet technical and business requirements
  • Attended and lead trainings and bootcamps, including: Storage Xperts, vBCA Bootcamp, NPX Bootcamp, Hackthons
  • Critical Deal Reviewer within SLED, supporting other SEs to ensure nothing is missed
  • Present about Nutanix at various events, in front of technical and business focused individuals

[May 2014 -> Apr 2015] Lead Architect @ Carenection

  • Built a highly available and scalable tele-video platform for remote video interpretation company while maintaining service to legacy customers on proprietary video conferencing solutions
  • Helped split IT department into separate company (Carenection) to leverage powerful private healthcare network we built, to service more than just tele-interpretation for health care customers
  • Lead small group to develop next-generation video platform to replace Polycom, Cisco, and MS Lync

[Oct 2012 -> May 2014] Virtualization Engineer @ Carenection

  • Implemented Nutanix to simplify 3-tier virtualization platform (early Nutanix customer)
  • Deployed Polycom Virtual RMX (on Nutanix) to perform live video transcoding, connecting various video platforms over a single video interfrace designed for Healthcare Provider use
  • Involved in troubleshooting hundreds of different hospital network environments, specifically highly noisy WiFi deployments, for video and audio codec performance issues
  • Architected dual datacenters to ensure platform resilience and

[May 2010 -> Sep 2012] Senior Help Center Analyst @ BayCare HomeCare

[Oct 2009 -> Apr 2010] Medical Records Warehouse Tech @ BayCare HomeCare

Contact

So you’ve read this far (why?), and you want to reach out - I welcome it!

Email: wk [at] thisdomain