Intro to Life & Tech
I’m a technical architect, by trade. My current focus is Data & Analytics and cloud technologies, two burgeoning fields full of promise as companies look to become more data-driven. I love what I do, and I love the technology and where it’s going. But I also live the frustrations of working in a highly-regulated corporate data shop every day. From legacy data we just can’t get people to stop using, to new governance problems introduced by the world of hybrid-cloud, streaming, and IoT. From partner IT teams who have a hard time understanding “data people,” to business partners who think they don’t need IT or architects at all — even when regulators say they do. My information security peers don’t want anybody to access any data anywhere, ever, but my business partners want to “democratize” the data. I’m told my company works in an Agile manner, but nothing about it seems particularly agile to me. I’m asked by my own leaders to focus on strategy, but the data engineering and business teams I support want quick tactical solutions to meet arbitrary and rapidly-approaching deadlines.
Oh, and every problem that arises is an architecture emergency.
My day job is to wade through all of these inherent contradictions and make sure everyone has the tools they need, while somehow keeping my technology domain clean, performant, and compliant with internal and external standards. This constant tug-of-war is my world, 8–10 hours a day, 5–6 days a week, and I have a love/hate relationship with all of it.
Fortunately, that’s not all I do. As my bio indicates, I have an array of current interests and creative outlets — and my background and education are perhaps even more varied.
I’ve been a cashier, a dockhand, party boat captain, and a pilot, a software engineer at multiple levels, and an IT manager. I’ve studied communications, photography, music, writing, welding, stoic philosophy, world religions, aviation, meteorology, business, marketing, economics, and technology. I’m an extreme introvert, which comes with….challenges (everybody loves an INTJ with some INFJ tendencies, right?). I love to read and understand how things work. I finished an MBA in 2016. I’ve been married to my best friend (and proofreader/editor) for 13 years and counting, and we have two amazing children who probably teach us more than we could ever teach them. Before we had kids we traveled to every beach on every island we could. For 8 years we took 1 or 2 big trips per year just to see how different the sand was on every beach. I nearly died on Maui on our babymoon and spent most of it in a hospital bed next to a lonely native Hawaiian man dying of stomach cancer. I love to be active, but with two kids, two dogs, a house, and a tech career, it’s all I can do to squeeze some exercise in every day.
Now, none of this experience makes me particularly qualified to give advice or tell anybody how to do things. In fact, such an assorted past probably affords me more shame than badges of honor. But my view of the world has become pretty interesting as a result. I’d like to think I’ve learned some stuff from it all, and I happen to like to write. Mostly it’s for my own sanity, but maybe others will enjoy the stories or glean something from the lessons I’ve learned along the way.
So in this blog, I’ll write about technology; about corporate culture and leadership; about life, music, marriage, fitness, and fatherhood; and maybe one day, I’ll travel again and write about that.
This is Life & Tech.
-Mike Henry
