Wain Parham

Background

About Wain Parham

How does someone go from Chicago music composer to DevOps engineer? I get asked that occasionally. The answer is twofold- Love to learn - Surround yourself with amazing supportive people. I've always had my hands in both tech and the arts. I grew up performing on stage while teaching myself C programming at 10. I provided technical support at an engineering firm in my teens—while playing Toby in a local production of Sweeney Todd. While working on my music degree, I worked at the school computer labs. The running joke among my family is that I don't have hobbies so much as secondary careers. My life took a major turn at STRATA (later FreeWheel), a Comcast subsidiary, where I joined the technical operations team and quickly noticed the need for automation. With "Automate Everything!" as my mantra, I dove into PowerShell and Python and developed over 150 tools, including a client self-service utility that reduced support calls by over This led to an MVP award and transitioning to a newly forming DevOps team, where I was tasked with migrating applications to AWS. Just as this transition happened, Covid hit, and the rest of my team was locked down in London. Suddenly I was learning AWS cloud infrastructure on the fly all while learning what on earth a CI/CD pipeline was and only had a couple of hours each day that I might be able to reach out to a superior for assistance. I didn't give up on the music and performing. I joined the Artistic board of TUTA Theatre, Chicago. I competed in a National Opera singing competition on New York. I started a band.briefly. That was a hilarious disaster. With a massive thanks to those London engineers I accomplished my first large goal on time, designing and building a database backup and recovery system for our all of our environments in AWS and providing multi-region replication in case of catastrophic failure. From there everything became all about migrating our products and systems to Kubernetes, kicking off a whole new world of personal learning and growth. A previous manager of mine started a new team focusing on Site Reliability. I was brought on as an SRE and began handling cluster deployment and maintenance as well as enablement. The message was always learn, inform, teach, document, develop, inspire, and empower. I'm a big fan of this way of thinking. I'm now based in Seattle and have experience in Kubernetes, AWS, automation, Site Reliability, DevOps practices, Linux, scripting, teaching, documentation, and a million other things. I'm excited to see what I can bring to my next role.