Michael Mcguire Email & Phone Number

It all started with a flaky printer driver ...Purdue University, back in the digital stone age, and my dot matrix printer couldn't handle certain characters in an author's name within a bibliography I was compiling for a term paper. A philosophy paper, nothing to do with coding ... just with that wretched umlaut. Hours later, after digging through arcane config files, tweaking this and adjusting that, I watched as the dot matrix spit out the name -- umlaut intact.The power, the thrill! I cackled like a mad scientist.Well, I still ended up with a triple degree in English, Philosophy, and Professional Writing, but my first job out of college was technical writing, paving the way to a full-on tech career. And while I don't fiddle with printer drivers any more, I still orchestrate containers and applications and servers across the cloud. More power and madness than Herr Doctor Frankenstein in an electrical storm.The crucial thing that remains from those printer driver days is an utter obsession with figuring out how things work and how to improve them. Information Technology (in general) and DevOps (in particular) has provided all of the challenge and depth a mad scientist could ever desire. Through years of workplace experimentation and enough online training to throttle a fiber line, I've honed my skills in server administration, coding, cloud administration, configuration management, and infrastructure provisioning. But wait ... there's more! Throw in online security, resource monitoring, observability dashboarding and you get just a sample of the DevOps power that's just on the other side of the cloud bank, waiting to zap your synapses awake.Ok, enough with the Frankenstein references -- I write horror in my spare moments and sometimes I get my wires crossed. But when my wires and synapses are properly aligned, I do DevOps and live the lifestyle, enjoying the challenge of staying on the edge of technology and responding to the wild pace of change. And it all started with an umlaut ... and that cackle.

• 

  Purdue University

  Professional Writing, English, Philosophy