Aaron Aldrich

• Established organizer group for First Ever DevOpsDays Hartford conference
• Soliciting sponsors in Enterprise Heavy, Start-up poor environment
• Marketing to potential attendees

• Founded and Organizing Connecticuts first DevOps Meetup
• Building interest in local community

• Customer Face and point of contact for multiple accounts. 

As a small company, I've become the point of interaction for many accounts main stakeholders. I've also run the main support. I've interacted directly with the customers on the floor as well as in the board room making broad technical decisions and strategies for businesses. 

This is where I've honed skills for empathy towards the end-user and balancing that towards the needs of the business.

• Vision casting and primary direction for Support Team

Developed formal strategy for building the Technical Support team at Cage Data. I built the Knowledge Base for both internal use and external customers paying down documentation debt and formatting documents for concise information and readability.

• Complete daily stand-up process revamp for reduced time and increased efficacy.

Altered our current daily stand-up process which was taking upwards of 30 minutes and getting tuned out, ignored and offering little information. Added a new "check-in" process which added more useful context to our days while bringing stand-up time down to 7-15 minutes.

• Public and ghost writing for the Cage Data Blog and customer communications

Dubbed the official team 'wordsmith' I became the go-to check for any written communication from Cage Data. I've written blog entries, ghost written others, and written or edited multiple public and private customer communications. My knowledge, skills and a healthy dose of pedantry have established me as the source for clear communications for not just information, but also understanding the tone and subtext of written communications. 

• Brand Building and Public Speaking

This is where I fell in love with the concept of Technical Evangelism. On behalf of Cage Data I have spoken at multiple DevOpsDays and other conferences bringing our company into the awareness of a larger national audience from our local roots.

• Heavy exposure to OpenSource via primary Linux operating environment
• Instrumental in building IT Support Knowledge base and technical documentation
• My first heavy foray into using Open Source running a whole company:
  • Heavy use and exposure to the Linux Terminal Server Project
  • Primarily working with Debian and Ubuntu maintaining operations for warehouse, sales and embedded systems
• Work in mixed Windows & Linux environment and have to self-build solutions to everyday functionality problems for the IT team
• Helped turn around the image of the IT Support team from, "the grumpy folks that fix our computers" to a team that can genuinely help 

• Hands-on, internal technical support for the US Courts
• Healthy dose of Politics and navigating the social hierarchy while providing technical support and solving user's important problems
• Daily interaction with federally appointed Judges, listening and solving the problems most important to them
• Daily interaction fixing technical issues during a court session in front of jurors, court staff, counsel and federal judges. 
• Completed tasks and sought learning beyond my role, built the VPN inter-network between campuses, administrated multiple domains with no real senior Systems Administrator or Network Administrator. Had to be self taught.
• Basic Splunk implementation

• Daily interaction with disgruntled, unsatisfied customers.
• Building empathy and solving the problems important to end-users
• Learned how to Linux
• Built a strong pull towards continuous improvement