Get to know me

James Garcia

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Who I Am

I am an experienced developer with over 7 years working at Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Austin, TX who has a strong sense of empathy leading world-wide teams to implement and support enterprise-grade software development solutions. Whether it is for my immediate team or for the customers I support, my teams practice/promote DevOps methodology and learn about what makes development organizations productive and placing focus on key aspects that need improvement.

We work to eliminate technical debt by automating where possible, and we do our due diligence to ensure the value of what we are working on can be realized by the business. This work includes (but is not limited to) individual technical contributions (writing code, building SDLC pipelines), holding architectural reviews with management, presenting deep technical material at a high level to both peers and management, and speaking directly to customers about solutions.

I have two outstanding children under 5 and a lovely wife in the educational field that I am immensely proud of. They have been hugely supportive of me as I have traveled the world and worked with people from all backgrounds to talk about adapting or transforming their workflows, including the adoption of DevOps/ChatOps. My line of thinking is definitely broadened and empowered with the perspectives they provide me. Understanding how my children learn and being involved with my wife's classroom sheds light on the potential that can be accomplished with effective communication.

I admittedly have not been very active on social media due to the fact I enjoy talking directly to folks or prefer writing technical content for distribution, although I am absolutely open to the idea. I have an optimistic outlook on work and personal items and enjoy looking for ways to make life better for both.





Ask Me...

...anything you would like to know, whether it is personal or work related. I will try to give you a few details below, but if you would like to have a conversation about how I like to work, what I like to do in my free time, or what my passions are, feel free to ask anytime.

My specific goals are not necessarily tied to an individual "type" of work, but rather I strive to understand the needs of a team and how I can apply my expertise to drive solutions, even if it is individual technical work or a higher-level architectural role.





How I Enjoy Working

We work in a mix of office and remote settings. About 10% of my team is located in the office, but the remainder of the team and the customers we support are remote, in locations all over the world. I am comfortable in either setting (especially in an asynchronous conversation-based environment), and have placed a lot of focus on maturing in the remote space with our ChatOps solution due to the benefits it provides:

There are multiple ChatOps tools available, I have personally used Slack and Flowdock frequently.

Our work has a heavy compute requirement, and we have relied on both public and private cloud solutions as well as internal bare metal infrastructure hosts. We strive to reduce our infrastructure footprint as much as possible, including only spinning up instances that are required on-demand, only for the duration it is needed. For instance, we have built an automated testing suite for GitHub Enterprise. The entire suite is built on-demand in an OpenStack private cloud using Docker and a Selenium Grid, and once it completes its execution, the entire environment is terminated so we are not left with any hardware unnecessarily cycling air in the data center. The philosophy we use (in terms of pets and cattle) is to build around cattle and only use pets when absolutely necessary.

Documentation is another key aspect of my work. Technical work cannot be valued unless it is articulated correctly. I can claim to have exceptional technical and non-technical writing abilities, and I constantly apply writing to everything I do. This includes how-to's, implementation steps, training material, etc. Lately I have focused on writing Markdown-formatted documents on our internal GitHub Enterprise instance.

I have had the privilege of serving in multiple roles and capacities over the course of my career and am always looking to apply and expand my expertise. Some of the roles I have served in includes:

I enjoy working with people from all over the world and always show empathy to those who I can make an impact on.





Notable Work

Details are in my Resume, but I'd like to show a few of my more recent highlights below.

I have written many technical documents, including:

I have served as a technical demo staffer for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) at two of the public HPE Discover conferences:

hpe-discover-london
Demonstrating a GitHub Enterprise environment build using Hubot, OpenStack and Nagios at HPE Discover London.
hpe-discover-las-vegas
Talking to a customer about the benefits of DevOps at HPE Discover Las Vegas.

Attended other conferences relevant to transformation work we work towards:

I have given many presentations and training classes, including:

hpe-devops-austin
Presenting at a DevOps IT Transformation talk in Austin, TX.

Traveled to regional locations for team worksessions:

hpe-shanghai-1 hpe-shanghai-2
Speaking about GitHub Enterprise to an audience in Shanghai, China.

Recommended books on DevOps:

Additional technical work:

For additional details, please checkout my Resume, or ask!





Interests and Hobbies

For work interests and hobbies, I am interested in learning about the latest relevant technologies to enable development teams to move at the speed of business. The definition of a developer from my perspective has evolved to include many concepts...no longer is a high-performing developer only involved in coding and database work. To be a high-performing developer, you must also have proficiency in business analysis, automated testing, infrastructure as code, security minded, operations/support, user experience, etc.

Traditional thinking when it comes to designing a solution tends to look something like:

The terms "front-end" tend to apply to Visual/Interaction while "back-end" tends to apply to Data/Infrastructure. Then, the Logic layer tends to be an integration to form a sort of "Technologist" role where things like APIs and magic happens to fit the two together. Rather than thinking in these terms, applying full-stack design thinking would free up a developer's mind to focus on the solution-centric design rather than only the user-centric outcome.

I enjoy reading other developer blogs to gain insight, attending conferences to hear about new trends, and listening to developer pain points to attempt to come up with solutions. For example, lately I have been looking to reduce infrastructure costs a la OpenStack and Docker containers. I am also a data-driven person, in which I like to make decisions based on data vs. assumptions, and will work to data mine where I can to make more informed decisions.

For personal interests and hobbies, my top priority is my family. They are what drives me to go further, they support me in what I do and I work to teach them concepts from the technology industry.

We like to travel when possible for work or leisure in any capacity (hiking, driving, flying, sight-seeing, etc). We have used the opportunities in the locations described above to see once-in-a-lifetime landmarks and hope to make it back to those places with the full family soon!

In terms of hobbies, great question! Cars are most likely my favorite...my in-laws live nearby and are Corvette enthusiasts. One day I hope to get a toy I can play with . . There are a variety of TV shows I like to watch (Game of Thrones, The Blacklist, Scorpion, ...) and movies (lately we have been very heavy on the kid-friendly movies!). While attending South by Southwest in Austin, I visited the Game of Thrones booth and had a chance to sit on the Iron Throne:

iron-throne
Got a chance to sit on the Iron Throne in between sessions at South by Southwest in Austin.

I enjoy a variety of sports and cheer for my Texas-based college/professional teams, including basketball, baseball, soccer and football. My favorite sport is college football. When given a chance, I will play in any sport on a team...some say I can be quite competitive...