It’s been a couple of years since I regularly wrote on this blog, and wow, a lot has changed in that time. In early 2017, I took on an Executive Director of Cloud Engineering role at NCR for Hospitality, which shifted my focus from being a Cloud Engineering Architect, which focused on culture and technology to achieve transformational outcomes our business needed to get to the next level, to an executive function over a four region global organization of 70–100 people. This was quite a growth challenge for me, and I hope you understand that I didn’t have it in me to write about it.

In my new role my team has accomplished a lot that we’re proud of. First, we migrated our entire product portfolio in three international regions to Azure, using Infrastructure as Code and Chef. The vast investments we made that you can read about earlier were put to good use, and it was great to see the investment pay off so handsomely.

Second, in 2020 we managed a 4X increase in ordering traffic almost overnight when the pandemic hit and people were forced to utilize digital channels for ordering food. The pandemic has hit the restaurant industry hard, but the silver lining in that has been seeing our NCR Online Ordering product help struggling restaurants stay open through the crisis.

The final element of my role that I’m proud of is the extensive coaching I’ve started doing with people both inside and outside my team. I’ve reached a place where the years of problems, reading, growing, and thinking about career development have yielded some good, transformational advice for people wanting to take their careers to the next level. I find it incredibly rewarding, and I want to write about it. Most of these posts will come from those sessions, where an insight is what is needed to take someone’s mentality to the next level.

On a personal level, our family is very happy in Boulder; we feel like we have found our place in the world. Late last year, Annie started an engineering role at HashiCorp, a company that impresses us both. Our kids are getting to the secondary education phase where they know everything. The pandemic has presented for us challenges as parents and a family that greatly surpass anything we have ever experienced. But we have each other, and we are making it through the journey.

Thanks for reading. I’m hopeful the insights I’ve gained in the past couple of years can be as helpful for you as they are to me and those I coach.