zpallin.com

Zach Pallin

Projects

About

In 2013, a friend of mine offered me a junior position at a tech company as a "DevOps," and I've been stuck doing that ever since. Over ten years later, I have a handle on Platform Engineering, CI/CD workflows, CLI Tooling, Build and Deployment.


Sometimes, I'll admit to knowing a bit about AWS, Kubernetes, and Bazel. I have written quite a lot of Terraform and a number of Helm charts. I have contributed to production Python, Golang, C#, NodeJS, and PHP codebases in my career, but I also once spent a lot of free time writing Rust.


My first tech job was working in a colo/telcom answering urgent phone calls, followed by racing on a razor scooter between rows of server lockers to troubleshoot loud beeping noises and dangling cables. I also wrote some math generators with LaTeX there.


I have read the C Programming Language by K&R a couple of times; it reads like prose. Gene Kim's books, notably The Phoenix Project and Accelerate, also inspired me. I'd read Kim Scott's Radical Candor again, which gave me some courage to be more than just a worker bee.


I watched Guido von Rossum explain why upgrading to Python 3 was mandatory at PyCon 2014 in Montreal. Separately, I joined C2SV in San Jose the summer of 2013 where I got to see Iggy Pop and the Stooges play live, and chat with Steve Wozniak, Nolan Bushnell, John McAfee, and Jello Biafra. Once, I briefly attended GDC in SF, before I got a Tier 3 support call to handle an on-site emergency at work.


While at Reputation.com, I worked under Bruce Scott (Oracle's 1st employee) for a year and a half. Bruce was a great mentor, courageously devoted to process and organization, who was always humbled when folks would bring up the default Oracle "bscott" user story.


In fact, everyone in the Reputation.com software division was amazing to work with. All thanks to Manish Balsara, VP of Engineering, whose unmistakable laugh could always be heard anywhere in the office. I still think about how devoted our team was to forgo 20 minutes of our lunch break every day just to drive to iDumpling in Redwood City to get the best lunch possible, when we had a decent cafeteria on-site.


I've participated in a few Global Game Jams over the years with my long-time friend and former colleague Dan McCue. We built a few cool games that didn't totally suck; I can write game logic, but I prefer to handle things like menus and multiplayer networking.


I spend most of my free time playing music, which is by far my favorite hobby. I don't bring software into my music, but working in IT did teach me I could learn anything I wanted, so now I play a variety of instruments, dare I say well.


I am more of a systems and operations thinker; big idea guy. Software came naturally to me, I did not go to school for this. I have a degree in political science.


I can't admit I am the best at anything in my field, but when you work with me, you'll appreciate me for my candor, my cheerful willingness to get dirty, and that I can bring (very) large projects to completion.