Who I Am

me

Hey, I’m Kevin. I spent 35 years in Florida, then my wife Jessica and I packed up our lives and moved to Seattle. If you want the short version: I traded boat ramps for trailheads, hot humidity for cold mountain passes, and fishing off docks for skiing down trails. I’m almost constantly obsessing over building the next thing.

Kevin and Mittens Mittens — we scooped him up off the streets of Bradenton while Jessica was in pharmacy school. He’s a sweetheart. Very needy.

Career

I hate to identify myself by my profession, but that’s what adults do in the US, and I’m no different. I’m a software/systems engineer and I’ve been doing this for around 15 years now. That’s not a long career, but wow, have things changed.

When I started I was building .NET software, working on Sharepoint, running stuff on Windows Server for a small non-software business. Hyper-V was a big deal. I started tinkering with PHP and some homelab projects and managed to get my foot in the door in the software industry. I worked for some time as a Java dev and somehow worked my way into a “devops” job (I never want to go back to Jenkins and Puppet). We were still deploying on hardware back then.

Over the next few years I bounced around some devops and infosec jobs. Picked up some “cloud” experience. And for the past 8 years I’ve been an SRE working somewhere that’s cloud native and pretty bleeding edge (I don’t know if I should post my employer here, maybe later I’ll update this).

Life

I have a lot going on outside of work.

Like I mentioned earlier, I like to go skiing (I’m a beginner though) and hiking with Jessica. During the winter we’re up in the mountain passes most weekends and any days she has off.

Out on the slopes

We spend a lot of time during the summer between all the different national parks, Rainier being the most accessible and probably our favorite (though I love the variety at Olympic National Park). On weekends when we don’t want to get out of town, you’ll probably find us exploring a local park — I’m a big fan of Seward, Lincoln, and Discovery.

View from the top of Neahkahnie Mountain on the Oregon coast Neahkahnie Mountain — a solid hike with a great lookout over the coast.

We like to travel. Before I started traveling I never thought I’d move out of my home state. It’s because of travel we moved to the PNW. The “Covid years” kinda slowed us down a bit. And moving out to the PNW has opened up a ton of road trip possibilities, so we’re driving more often than we ever did before.

Jessica and me in Ireland

Hobbies

I like to create. So most of my hobbies center around making things.

My wife always wants me to rank things, so I guess I’ll rank the big ones off the top of my head:

  1. Woodworking
  2. Cooking and Baking
  3. Reading and Writing
  4. Software and Engineering

Why have a blog

I don’t know. SEO linking between projects I work on and domains I own. Somewhere to centralize and jot down my thoughts that I want to shout out to the world (probably easier with social media, but fuck that). Practice writing and have somewhere to write about whatever.