NEW JOB ALERT!

Over the past few years I’ve been working a lot on how we build empathy and gratitude for others. It’s good for my PTSD recovery and it’s necessary for the role Site Reliability Engineering plays in technical operations. I am learning that my own success is something to be proud of, not because I have a privilege to be proud, but because others can benefit from seeing me succeed.

Because, you know, Pride is a nasty sin. Pray every night, be penitent before God … is how we were raised. Religious Trauma is a real thing and escaping from those mindsets isn’t easy. It’s taken me decades to accept that I’m not constantly serving some sort of penance to be tallied at the Pearly Gates, only then being forgiven and resolved of all my sinful mistakes. I am supposed to live a miserable, guilt-ridden, closeted life.

Penance and Guilt are stupendously effective Knowledge Shields (mental gymnastics used to intellectually avoid a challenging belief) for being curious about Pride. It wasn’t until I found myself really caring about the success of others that I began seeing how Pride was instrumental.

Someone on Mastodon told me they were proud of me. It hit me then, for some reason … from a practical stranger … that Pride is a human trait like Trust. We should nurture it in our community, not be shamed and guilted into not having it as individuals.

It’s an Oxygen Mask mindset, like they say on passenger airplanes: affix yours before anyone else’s. But I don’t think I really understood how that worked, not before deeply examining myself. It’s quite a Zen thing to realize that you can reach deeper happiness through the happiness of others. Because you are breathing and able to. And PROUD of what you are.

My mother really needed to hear some good news today, and it really gave me a smile to hear from her that I gave her one.

So I’d like to offer a smile to you today. :)

I’m happy to share that I’ve signed on the dotted line with Weedmaps as a Senior SRE starting in February. I’ll be flexing my knowledge of Observability and Reliability. There’s talk about handing over Incident Management to me (bring it!). There are DR projects underway and lots of Applied Resilience Engineering opportunities. Plus I cannot wait to get Practice of Practice Gamelan going again.

I’m joining a large SRE team with aspirations to do great things and I’m super PROUD to get started!