Some interesting folks in DevOps Days crowd of this era were talking much about the ways in which DevOps as an idea had taken much, had more to take, and could stand to understand better Lean Manufacturing (like the Toyota Production System & Theory of Constraints). I acquired this interest, and was drawn thus to an Industrial IoT startup a friend of mine was Engineer #1 of.

I became head of technical operations, managing provisioning, monitoring, and SRE of the cloud backends of all our systems; co-developing internal tools; helping manage some aspects of firmware & fields operations; briefly was responsible for MDMing a fleet of heterogeneous Android tablets… I don't recommend that one.

I helped steer this ship from the era of SaltStack, briefly into Chef, into Docker and psudeo-homespun container management (remember CoreOS fleet?), and onto post-1.0 & CNCF Kubernetes.

I was part of a loud minority who a mix of serious & shitposting advocated for migrating away from our Meteor monolith towards both Elixir/Erlang (early days of Phoenix) & Rust (circa 1.0). 

But alongside tons and tons of YAML I wrote my fair share of Node, Ruby, Python, and lots of bash automation for BYOD workstations.