Cory's Vanity Domain

Hello 👋

If you're reading this, you likely followed a link from my resume - in which case: thanks, that's super cool of you! - or you're looking for a lawyer in Michigan. I'm sorry, I am not he. If by some crazy happenstance, you just found me on Google because you're looking for an engineer - hit me up: contact [at] coryb.xyz

Things a Recruiter Might Care About

I've been a professional software engineer for 8 years, and a fulltime DevOps engineer for 6 years.

Now

For the past 5 years, I've worked for a fintech company, on the DevOps team. Mostly this means:
  • working on/troubleshooting yaml pipelines in ADO (on-prem and cloud)
  • helping devs with Git and k8s
  • writing lots and lots of Powershell, mostly in support of our bespoke CMDB/metadata system
  • building Azure things in Terraform and Bicep

Then

I worked in healthcare for 9 years, at first as tech support/system administration, then writing and managing a variety of C#/XAML and Node/React apps, including:
  • an automated licensing service
  • a CRM for some reason?
  • many many test tools (engineering and integration testing)
  • automated server configuration (because no one knows about or uses remotely modern tooling like Ansible in healthcare)
I built HL7 interfaces for two years, integrating data with a variety of EMR systems. Please never ask me to do that again.

About This Site

Originally, this was hosted on a VPS from DigitalOcean, running nginx to serve static files. I did everything by hand, but that's not ver DevOps-ey, so I put it in a container and put that in k8s. The page was also originally React, but I rewrote it in Svelte because Svelte is freaking awesome and this is a personal project so no one can tell me I'm not allowed. If there's a link to a blog at the top of this page, then that means that future me finally published that, so you can how I put this together. Is that overkill for what is basically some static HTML and css? Yes, it absolutely is. But I don't think anybody wants to pay me to build plain HTML pages, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

About Me

My name is Cory and I like computers. I've realized that although I mention this on my resume, most people like to see code samples. I also discovered that corybainbridge.com and coryb.xyz were available, and I had $12, so here we are.

Anyway, about me. I'm 41 years old, and I've been in love with technology since I watched my first episode of Star Trek: TNG. It was a future where everyone got along (mostly) and there were holodecks and tablets and computers that listened to you and talked back; that seemed like a wonderful future, and got me to look at how much of that future was available to me in 1990. "Not much" was the answer, but seven year olds have grand imaginations, and I was hooked both on Trek and tech.

I was lucky to have access to a few 486 IBM-compatables and Apple clones over the years, before getting my very own computer at around age fifteen, in the form of a Packard Bell featuring a Cyrix 266. That computer taught me a few things:

  • Don't skimp on the CPU
  • Not all CPUs are created equal
  • Tech marketing is full of lies

I bought a Computer Shopper catalog and started reading Maximum PC (then boot) religiously, planning and dreaming of what my next computer would feature. I was set up with an internship at a local computer repair shop and spent the school year doing all sorts of repair and maintenance on PCs. That was a magical time, when things came with paper manuals that you had to read or risk blowing things up - I once accidentally overclocked an AMD K6-2 266MHz CPU to 500MHz when I decided to wing it instead of checking the manual for the correct FSB and multiplier settings. I knew I wanted to do this professionally; there was nothing more satisfying than someone handing me a dead computer and resurrecting it.

I ended up enlisting in the Marine Corps the next year, wanting to do something, anything related to computers. "Needs of the Marine Corps" being what they are, I ended up as a RADAR repairman instead. This worked out for the best, as I met some really great folks and learned a lot about how electronics work. Working with the Solaris OS on the AN/TPS-59 encouraged me to learn more about UNIX/Linux, and I learned a lot about troubleshooting best practices.

Post-Corps, after a brief stint as a security guard, I found a job doing ECG tech support for a medical device manufacturer based in Irvine, CA. After a few years, that morphed into a general system administrator role, where I found myself spending entirely too much time imaging and configuring servers. I started looking into ways to automate things and picked up a few courses on C#, and managed to shave tons of time off the configuration process. I was lucky enough to move on from sysadmin work to a full time engineering role, then to my current company as DevOps.
© 2024 Cory Bainbridge