About this website (and me)
My name is Jeff Beal, and this is my website. I'm a software engineer with twenty+ years of experience building software and leading engineering teams. I've worked for twelve very different companies including companies you've definitely heard of (Amazon, Google, and Hulu), companies you might hear of soon (Ramp, Scale AI), and companies that you almost definitely will not (unless you read about them here, since I'm going to be writing about all of them).
One of the things I have learned in these jobs is that writing down an idea helps me to wrap my head around it and firm it up. As I write, I think about the details, I come up with questions I need to research, and find the data necessary to answer those. Writing teaches me more about my own idea than just having it. Most of my writing has been in the context of my jobs, and is hiding out in corporate wikis and SharePoint repositories. I've decided it's time to have my own space where I can write whatever I want and share it with anybody interested in reading it, which is where we are.
I expect to write a lot about topics adjacent to my career, starting with an article touching on each of the jobs I've held, and getting into specific technology and professional topics. Over time, I expect more personal topics to find their way into these pages, in part because, in many ways, I view my personal and professional growth as a human to be tightly inter-related. I don't think it's really possible to have a fully separate personal and professional life, so I won't attempt to uphold that fiction here.
Yes, but what about the tech behind the site?
In the past, I've tried some of the major blogging platforms, written a few posts and shared them with family or friends, but I often found the experience a little frustrating because of things I couldn't quite do, or features that would require me to upgrade to a premium plan. I've looked into some of the newer incarnations of those, and found them (or their pricing models — looking at you, Medium) similarly frustrating. So, this site, I'm building myself. The site itself is a work in progress, along with all its content. Expect the design to evolve over time; expect pages to move around; expect the unexpected. (I'll try not to break any links, because broken links make the Internet worse for everybody, but at least in the very early days, I'm not even sure I won't do that)
Most of the content on the site will be written using DocBook XML, a language I learned to love at my first job out of college and converted into HTML using XSLT stylesheets I will be writing myself — exactly what I was doing at that first job. The website is hosted on Amazon Web Services, where I spent much of the middle part of my career on the RDS and Elasticache teams. I am configuring and setting up the website using Terraform, which is a technology I use on a daily basis at my current job on the infrastructure team at Ramp. In short, I've built the website using the same technologies I've used in my career, spanning from the beginning until now. (I'll try to incorporate more. Now that I finally decided to plunk down some money on a domain name, who knows what I will do.)
By the way, I've heard some complaints that one of the links above was not what people were expecting. While this surprises me, if you were expecting a different video to play, this might be it. Or maybe I'm just really bad about knowing what people expect.