I ♥ my Wife, Son, and 🐶

I put 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 over 💻

I enjoy a good 🥃

I listen to, collect, and archive 🎷 Live Music

I’m working on improving 🌎 Indoor Air Quality

I’m a hell of a datacenter and application architect. Scoping out unusual application requirements, solving unique business issues with technology, or figuring out what the next gen architecture will be is where my head lives most of the time.

Digging deeper

I care greatly about the people around me. That includes my family, friends, team mates, and the tech community I’m a part of on Twitter. 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 son (1yo) to think about a problem or clear my head. 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 our numbered and our time with loved ones is far too short.

I am recently diagnosed ADHD, which I’m finding to be a superpower when managed properly. Unfortunately, it’s gone un-diagnosed and un-managed for close to two decades. It’s amazing how clear things become and how much easier I’m finding it to focus on the project at hand now that it’s being managed properly.

I enjoy a good whiskey (boubon, scotch, Japanese whiskey, etc), particularly when sharing it with a friend. I think whiskey has the ability to transport us to different places, through different flavor profiles and memory association. Certain whiskies will remind me of time spent with a certain friend or of a place I’ve visited.

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 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.

Indoor Air Quality has become a big passion of mine in the last several years. After three years of infertility, my wife and I made a lot of changes in our lives. From the food we eat to the products we buy, we dive deep into the possible health consequences. This means that I’ve started to think a lot about what off-gases from products we buy (hello Ikea furniture). A friend and I are well along the way to designing some indoor air quality sensors that I will be using to build out a consultancy for down the road. In the end, I would like to spend my days making a difference in people’s lives through improving their indoor air quality, rather than just building or marketing widgets in tech.

Specializations

  • Datacenter and Mission Critical Application Architecture and Design
  • Technical Marketing
  • VMware, Acropolis, Kubernetes
  • Hyperconverged Systems (Nutanix, VMware VSAN)
  • Containerization
  • Storage Systems
  • Python, Bash, back-end coding

Career

[Nov 2021 -> Current] 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