New year's resolutions mean it's time for me to start something new, this blog and writing about my work and what I've learned in the DevOps Space throughout the year!

About Me

My name is Jimmy Ungerman and I live in Boise, Idaho as a DevOps Solutions Architect with Boxboat, an IBM Company. I've been in the Cloud/DevOps space for the past 6 years working my way up from Linux Administration to the Cloud and all the fun things that come with it.

I started my career in a rotational program at UPMC, a massive healthcare corporation from my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. In that rotational program, I was lucky enough to work in their new Cloud Architecture group where I fell in love with all things Cloud and Automation and knew this was what I wanted to do. Since then, I worked for an AI startup focusing on architecting out their cloud footprint and making Dev's lives easier. From self-service dev portals for infrastructure to reducing their exorbitant cloud cost, I feel like I cut my teeth in the DevOps space with my time there. Finally, I've been here with Boxboat for the last two years learning even more from my incredible colleagues and helping customers with their Kubernetes, Cloud, and Containerization journeys. Over that time I've fallen in love with Kubernetes, the Gitops model, and automating anything and everything I can to make Dev lives easier.

Besides work, I watch college football way more than my wife wishes (Go Nittany Lions), golfing even if I'm a 22 handicap, Movies, TV, and video games. I'm an avid Homelabber (which will most definitely make its way into this blog at times), and I enjoy long walks on the beach.

Another Tech Blog?

I wanted to start this blog not only to get my footprint more out in the DevOps world but to help reflect on some of the work I've done throughout my career. I'll be writing about the fun challenges I've faced in my day-to-day job, the new homelab projects I want to complete this year, solutions I've implemented for clients, and trends I see in the industry moving forward.

I've learned a lot in my career seeing people write blog posts on solutions they've implemented. Search any problem you may be having deploying an application or standing up a cluster, and you'll find Medium posts galore on how these people did it. Having a first step toward a solution is always a major help, and I'm hoping I can do the same for other engineers along the way with the work I'm doing.

So what's first?

Seeing that I'm starting 2023 with my fancy new Solutions Architect title, I wanted to set some goals to accomplish this new year, the major one being achieving the Solutions Architect Certification for all three major clouds. If I'm going to Architect for them, might as well let people know I can, right?

First will be the Google Professional Cloud Architect Certification. We needed a couple more Google certifications for our partnership status with Google Cloud and I figured, "You have the least experience here, this will be great to learn". The exam is scheduled for the end of January and you should see a blog post detailing the ways I went about learning, studying, and preparing for the exam shortly after. And no, I won't be releasing questions or exam dumps.

So feel free to follow and stay tuned for what's to come! I hope this blog will give you ideas and help you in your work along the way!