I’m a Principal Software Engineer at Autodesk. I try my best to blog here as well as post my thoughts to LinkedIn and Mastodon, and I’m also trying out Bluesky. I dabble and aspire to do more open-source side projects on GitHub whenever I find this elusive thing called “free time.”

Bio

I received a bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain Management along with minors in Computer Science and Information Technology from Michigan State University in 2012, and I will be forever kicking myself and living with imposter syndrome for having not gotten a full degree in Computer Science.

I was a software engineer at Dow Chemical from 2012 to 2014 in Information Systems working on SharePoint development and from 2014 to 2018 in R&D working on applications for research and running our source control and CI/CD environments (Git with TFS / Azure DevOps) and managing our cloud Azure environment, amongst other things. This is where I learned to love PowerShell.

In 2018 I joined Autodesk as a software engineer on the newly formed Directory Services team to automate infrastructure in AWS and Azure and create automation and self-service for employees around all things Active Directory and Azure AD and Identity and Access Management. Since then our team has grown in scope to include Collaboration and Network automation use cases and work on FedRAMP compliance initiatives as well as involvement in Autodesk’s internal delivery platforms and open-source initiatives.

As we speak I am currently getting deep on data and working on AI solutions as part of Autodesk’s Enterprise AI team.

Things I Think About

Some of these are skills, some of them tools, some of them are other things, but in the interest of not trying to break them down by category, this is a non-comprehensive set of things I think about, in no particular order:

  • Software Engineering
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  • Version Control
  • SDLC
  • SOA
  • Git
  • Git Credential Manager
  • Git LFS
  • Git Shallow Clones and Sparse Checkouts
  • Git commit signing
  • GPG
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
  • Portable CI
  • GitOps
  • Design Patterns
  • Systems Design
  • Domain Driven Design
  • CQRS
  • Event Sourcing
  • Even Driven Architectures
  • Algorithms
  • Android
  • iOS
  • Architecture
  • Integration
  • Identity
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Decentralized Identity
  • Verifiable Credentials
  • Identity Verification
  • Security
  • Testing
  • Unit Testing
  • Integration Testing
  • Serverless
  • Serverless Framework
  • Terraform
  • OpenAPI
  • JSONSchema
  • Collection+JSON
  • OData
  • GraphQL
  • Server-sent Events (SSE)
  • Websockets
  • gRPC
  • Scripting
  • PowerShell
  • PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)
  • PowerShell Module / Script Development and Distribution
  • NuGet
  • PowerShell Gallery
  • Chocolatey
  • Homebrew
  • Pester
  • Dev Machine Setup Scripts
  • Bash
  • Zsh
  • iTerm
  • Windows Terminal
  • Terminal Customization
  • Terminal History Prompts
  • VDI
  • Splunk
  • DHCP
  • DNS
  • DNSSEC
  • DNS over TLS
  • DNS over HTTPS
  • BIND
  • Networking
  • Zero Trust
  • Security
  • Cryptography
  • DevOps
  • SRE
  • Monitoring
  • Observability
  • Performance
  • Optimization
  • Cost Optimization
  • Windows
  • macOS
  • Parallels
  • C#
  • .NET
  • ASP.NET
  • Entity Framework
  • ORMs
  • Microservices
  • Cross-platform Development
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Visual Studio
  • PKI
  • SSL/TLS, mTLS
  • Code Signing
  • Active Directory
  • Quest ARS
  • NTLM / Kerberos
  • HashiCorp Vault
  • Packer
  • Spinnaker
  • Artifactory
  • Azure AD
  • Conditional Access
  • Privileged Identity Management
  • Privileged Access Management
  • Entitlement Management
  • Identity Protection
  • Password Protection
  • MFA
  • Phishing Resistant Credentials
  • FIDO2
  • WebAuthn
  • YubiKeys
  • MSAL (Microsoft Authentication Library)
  • CSS
  • SCSS
  • Bootstrap
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Node
  • JSON
  • XML
  • MVC
  • MVVM
  • Docker
  • MSDN and Visual Studio Enterprise Licensing
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • SQL Server Management Studio
  • Database Design
  • Database Normalization
  • Data Engineering
  • Data Platforms
  • Data Mesh
  • Azure Data Studio
  • MongoDB
  • Scaling
  • Azure
  • Azure Bicep
  • az CLI
  • Azure DevOps
  • GitHub
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitHub Codespaces
  • GitHub Package Management
  • GitHub Container Registry
  • GitHub Copilot
  • ChatGPT
  • DALL-E
  • Middleware
  • Retry Strategies
  • Machine Learning
  • AI
  • Anomaly Detection
  • Generative AI
  • OpenAI
  • Azure PowerShell
  • Azure Functions
  • Azure OpenAI Service
  • Azure API Management
  • Azure Functions
  • Azure Automation
  • Azure Service Bus
  • Azure Bastion
  • Bastion Hosts and Jump Boxes
  • Log Analytics
  • Azure Storage including Blobs, Queues, Tables, etc.
  • Logic Apps
  • Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets
  • Azure Key Vault
  • Azure DNS
  • Azure Front Door
  • Azure AKS
  • Azure RBAC
  • Azure Managed Identities
  • Azure Service Principals
  • Azure ARM
  • Azure Load Balancer
  • Azure WAF
  • Azure Application Insights
  • Azure Information Protection
  • Regular Expressions
  • Open-source
  • Cosmos DB
  • Kubernetes
  • Service Meshes like Istio, Open Service Mesh
  • Microsoft 365
  • Microsoft Licensing
  • SharePoint Online
  • Exchange Online
  • Microsoft Graph
  • Power BI
  • Data Loss Prevention
  • Search
  • Python
  • Windows Server
  • Hyper-V
  • Remote Desktop
  • Remote Desktop Gateway
  • IIS
  • SOX
  • SOC2
  • FedRAMP
  • PowerShell Remoting
  • Troubleshooting
  • Sysinternals
  • ILSpy
  • Fiddler
  • Wireshark
  • Profiling
  • Tracing
  • Linux
  • nginx
  • WSL
  • SSH
  • RDP
  • VNC
  • API Design
  • API Complexity
  • Caching
  • ACME Protocol from Let’s Encrypt
  • AWS
  • AWS CLI
  • AWS PowerShell
  • AWS CloudFormation
  • AWS CloudFront
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS API Gateway
  • AWS S3
  • AWS EC2
  • AWS Auto Scaling Groups
  • AWS SNS
  • AWS SQS
  • AWS DynamoDB
  • AWS Route 53
  • AWS SSM
  • AWS Secrets Manager
  • AWS EKS
  • AWS SAM
  • AWS ELB
  • AWS WAF
  • AWS Certificate Manager
  • AWS X-Ray
  • AWS KMS
  • AWS IAM
  • AWS CloudWatch
  • AWS CloudTrail
  • AWS EventBridge
  • High Availability
  • Regional Failover
  • Latency Based Routing
  • OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0
  • JWT and related specs
  • SCIM
  • SAML
  • Raspberry Pis
  • Video Editing
  • Photo Editing
  • Audio Editing
  • Photography
  • Videography
  • Audio Recording
  • Photoshop
  • Premiere Pro
  • Media Formats
  • Video Games
  • Music
  • Guitar
  • Writing
  • Diagramming
  • Communicating
  • Agile
  • Scrum
  • Whether or not we’re living in a post-scrum world
  • Kanban
  • Presenting and Speaking
  • Mentorship and Sponsorship
  • Setting Technical Direction
  • Being Glue
  • Exploration
  • Organizational Design
  • Team Topologies