My name is Lucas, I am a software engineer based in the SF Bay Area. I have been hacking and making things for the fun of it, as long as I can remember.
I have 16 years of experience working in the tech industry at both small startups and large companies. Over the last ten years, I have been focused on building a startup as a founding team member by working closely with customers in industries from automative manufacturing to banking and insurance. As a Sales Engineer and Solutions Architect, I have supported customers from all over the world. This job has afforded me the ability to travel not just within the US, but also to Europe, Africa and India. I am not much of a traveler, although I do enjoy getting to meet people and shake hands. Some of my best work memories have been meeting customers with my friend and VP of Sales. I believe very strongly that trust is earned via integrity and integrity is not stated but demonstrated.
Many of the customers I have supported through the years have been in regulated industries. Something that I enjoy doing, is guiding both my customers and engineering team with regard to compliance and security, which has been a staple in my career.
I have been involved in many of these accounts from the presale stage to where they are today. This experience has given me insight into how the sales process works and how to best nurture customer relationships.
Within the company from an engineering perspective, my focus has been multi-faceted. For the last 10 years, I have been responsible for ensuring security and performance in deployment strategy, as well as our software platform itself. This means that internally, I have not just acted as an Infrastructure engineer, but also a software engineer focused specifically on our SRE startegy.
When we first started our company, many customers would ask us to deploy our systems on-premise. This often times meant that we would be given some old server to repurpose and would be tasked with installing each component of our stack, one by one. This was very cumbersome and took too much time in ramping up POCs for our clients. Over the winter of 2016, I re-architected our solution to run in Docker. This allowed us to speed up our deployments drastically while at the same time ensuring that each POC environment was mostly the same regardless of customer needs. Over time our deployment needs became more complex. Due to this, I lead my infrastructure team in the next phase of our evolution which was to deploy on private clouds for our customers using Kubernetes. This change provided us the ability to scale horizontally and meet more aggressive SLAs. Kubernetes also empowered us to easily support all the major cloud vendors from AWS and GCP to Azure and Digital Ocean. Much like how our Docker strategy helped us to standardize our simple deployments; Kubernetes allowed our core systems to remain the same despite each vendor having their own solutions to various networking and deployment challenges.
I have many war stories, both technical and social that I can lean on to help guide how to best solve problems in business and engineering. From optimizing our platform to better scale, to supporting my company in contentious discussions with my head held high. I always went to bat for my team, company and in support of the solutions that we built.
This blog is not just about my professional life. I also wish to share some of who I am and what makes me tick as a person.
I am passionate about building and learning to do new things. I am a man of many hobbies, which have often times helped me connect with other people in business in ways that are unexpected.
A short list of my current interests are:
- Software security
- Software development
- Kubernetes
- IoT (reverse engineering products and building my own)
- Electronics
- Lock picking
- 3D printing
- CAD
- Retro video games
- Apple ][ computers
- Bicycling
- Bicycle wheel building
- Cooking
- Smoking BBQ
I consider myself to be a “jack of all trades master of none”. I take on many projects in general that require me to learn on the fly. I have become adept at building proof of concepts that can scale and be brought into production use. I hope to share some of my interests and things I work on for others to enjoy. The code that I share here will not always be generalized for others to easily make use of. However, I hope that the code I share, and my write ups explaining how it came to be and is used by me can serve to inspire others to build similar things.
Thank you for reading this
Below, I have shared some photos of my travels from over the years. Regretfully, I am not one for pictures and like to be in the moment when I am with others.
Please enjoy what I do have to share.
