Kurt Friedley

Systems/network/cloud architect/engineer/administrator/manager. Any combination of those works and I've had the pleasure of doing them all. I am a lifelong gamer, so of course the best analogy I can come up with for my career is through a game - Katamari Damacy. In this game, you start as a highly adhesive ball, and you roll over things until the ball has grown to ridiculous proportions because it's rolled over an entire city and gotten it all stuck to it. As a gamer, I'm always looking for the win conditions. So whenever something my team is working on looks like it's not going to make it past the goal posts, I dive headlong into whatever needs doing to push it forward. A lot of the time, this isn't something in my comfort zone. Sometimes, it's enough to push it past the goal line. And when that happens, all of the time, that thing I was doing that was new to me becomes mine. It gets stuck to me. And I am okay with this, maybe even proud, even if I'm starting all over again with this new thing a little over my head. This has led to me gaining some pretty broad skills. I've worked with DoD RMF requirements, AI, IA, containers, virtualization, multiple clouds, Linux, Windows, Citrix, workload orchestration, air-gapped deployments, networks, infrastructure as code, SecDevOps, and more. At this point, I've made the dive that got all of these things stuck to me so much that sometimes I can see when that kind of thing is coming, and I can offer up that insight to make sure we plan around it. If I don't see it coming... Well, maybe this thing I'm diving for gets stuck to me, too. And I am okay with this.