Hello for the first time..

About the author

Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Startup Founder and IT Leader, who has spent his career building, tuning and supporting mission critical systems. Platform creator, inquisitive technologist and innovation enthusiast with more than 23 years of Information Technology Industry experience. Experience includes Airlines, E-Commerce, Fintech and Streaming Services Industries, as well as, State and Local Government. Has launched several startups, providing an expert technical perspective on critical technology decisions. For more information about the author please visit his site at www.briandibella.com or Linkedin.

Welcome to my Blog

Welcome, this blog is for the purpose of helping fellow software engineers resolve issues faster by learning from mistakes I have seen in the professional world of Information Technology.  In addition, I outline how to build a high performing culture.  I hope to share my experiences so that others can improve upon their successes and avoid my failures.  

This blog is about everything digitally trans-formative: Cloud Architecture and Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, CI/CD, GitOps, DevSecOps, Containers, Monitoring and Alerting, as well as, what drives the culture of a high performing team and what does not.  I am particularly interested in sharing the good, the bad and the ugly stories of what happens in the trenches of IT. This blog will dive into the thought process on how to manage an enterprise environment and all of the people who build, support and keep it up and running. 

I've been working in the Information Technology (IT) industry for sometime now and I have seen a lot of very interesting things.  These experiences are the foundation of improving your IT infrastructure and the culture that lives among the processes and procedures as well as great stories.  I have worked for very large iconic fortune 100 companies, supported some of the largest technical providers, government agencies and built several startups.  I co-founded and founded three so far and have more ventures to come.  Being that I have been on the front lines of the application of technology at of every role I held, I have had the fortune to see a lot of the good the bad and the ugly.  

All events described in this blog will be, of course, protecting the innocent as I tell my stories of great calamity, success and woe.  The stories I tell here will keep parties anonymous when describing achievements or cautionary tales.  The information in this blog is more for learning from mistakes and successes.  Details describing names and organizations will remain confidential.  

A bit about me. I began learning DOS in the early 1980's as a student in my grade school, 3rd and 4th grade. However, my operating system of choice today is Linux and has been since 1997 when I installed my first version.  I never thought it would play such a central part of my career, so I initially chased a degree in Film.  I found myself always was drawn back to computing, however.  I struggled with math in grade school all the way through undergrad but learned to love statistics and it's practical application early on in my career.  

After earning a degree from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) with my Bachelors of Letters and Sciences in Geography with Environmental Studies focused on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing I interned as a digital map maker for a Municipality.  Transitioning to the private sector was seamless.   I began my career as a GIS Technician for a company that was trying to use a digital platform to produce paper maps.  

After a short while as a digital cartographer / GIS Analyst, I transitioned to supporting Information Systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Resource Managment (CRM) platforms and the infrastructure, middleware and databases on the backend, after the mapping department was outsourced.  I spent my career interacting with an offshore and nearshore world, as a result.  I have experienced the trade offs with cultural divides, division of work and bridging cultural differences between onshore, nearshore and offshore first hand.  I worked in the IT trenches at fortune 100 companies and governments over the following 19 years.   

I have more than 19 years of experience in the Information Technology industry as a Geographic Information Systems Analyst, Systems Engineer, Linux Administrator, Oracle Exalogic Subject Matter Expert, Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Lead DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes Administrator, Cloud Architect, Technical Team Lead and the do it all Co-Founder, Founder / CIO / CTO and Board Member with various startups. I have successfully led cross-functional teams, while developing and executing digital transformation technology strategy. 

I look forward to sharing battle stories, technical tips, how to handle specific technical and management issues, building a high performing culture and more. These stories will dive deep into the technical, issue, architecture and problems that were encountered and the solutions taken to remedy the issue.  I hope this blog supplies the readers with potential technical solutions and a starting point for run books that can later be automated to resolve issues before anyone needs to be woken up in the middle of the night to resolve similar issues.