Starting today I’ve officially hung up my virtual shingle and started this consulting business to help software engineering teams operate their products/services more efficiently and with less pain.
The road to getting here was full of interesting twists and turns!
Just a couple of months ago I was a Production Engineering manager at Meta, helping run one of their most important internal products. It basically streamlined how teams built, launched, and operated simple backend services (similar to what Heroku or AWS’ Elastic Beanstalk does). I was on that team for over two years and drove the much-needed changes required to reliably run such a service. I also built the PE team and their engagements for future iterations of internal service management products.
When I heard internally about the looming layoffs, I thought: “Well, given my responsibilities here, I certainly wouldn’t be affected by this!”
I was wrong. On Nov 9th, with 11,000 others- I got an automated email message telling me that I would no longer be working for the company.
After taking a deep breath and then quickly writing my “badge post” saying goodbye to my soon-to-be-former Metamates (and then a similar announcement on LinkedIn), I got a very interesting response.
In addition to the supportive replies I’ve gotten on the LinkedIn post, several of my former work colleagues that I partnered with over the years sent me private messages asking if I would be interested in doing freelance for them. Each of them described some kind of problem they were dealing with in production and how they enjoyed working with me and would love for me to jump in and lend a hand.
Which.. got me to thinking: what if I decided to not join another tech company, lending my skills and experience to exclusively them? What if I was able to lend it to any team that needed it?
And thus, Certo Modo was born. The company’s name is Latin for ‘certain way’. I tend to approach systems and operational problems in a certain way: leading with empathy and driving to understand the human elements, whether it be culture, process, or expertise. Combined with my knowledge and experience with running production services and managing teams, I’ve had a long track record of leaving products better than where I found them.
I’m really looking forward to working with you!