Speaker Details

Like many (most?) of us, I've been doing this for a long time - BBS administration in high school, Linux on my 486 in college, ethernet cables running through the hallways of my first apartment... you know the score. By the time I bought my first house I had at least a half-dozen headless machines running up my monthly power bills.

When I decided to sell everything I owned and move onto a cruising sailboat, I had to make dramatic changes in a lot of my core values. Hot showers and dry socks became novelties, and trying to run more than a laptop off a solar-and-wind-powered electrical system in the cloudy Pacific Northwest is laughably difficult. Offloading services to the cloud became an obsession, and soon I was scaling websites by day, bailing rowboats by night.

Five years living and working at anchor, sailing from Canada to Mexico and beyond, was enough to seal the deal - I want to do a circumnavigation. First I need to refill the bank accounts, so I've moved to San Francisco and I've accepted a role as a Cloud Applications Engineer with Cloudscaling/EMC for the next couple of years. Daily my skills are challenged, as we help our clients use OpenStack to build the next generation of agile datacenters.