Who am I?
My name is Patrick D’appollonio. I’m a Chilean Canadian that has been working for a handful of companies in North and South America as a Software Engineer. I’m currently working at Netlify as a Staff Software Engineer building the “Netlify for Netlify”: a pipeline to build, test, and deploy Netlify’s own internal services to Netlify’s Distribution Network.
While you might be tempted to call me a DevOps engineer, I’ve worked mostly in backend applications that happen to be running as DevOps tooling, specifically empowering Kubernetes clusters and Continuous Integration and Delivery.
You can find me on Twitter as @marlex and on GitHub as patrickdappollonio. All my projects you might be interested in are listed in the projects page of this blog.
Biggest achievements
- I led the migration of one of the biggest Canadian banks to the Cloud: As an expert in Cloud Native technologies, I helped a Canadian bank migrate their entire infrastructure from Pivotal Cloud Foundry to Google Cloud, achieving great results in terms of cost and performance. Here’s the press release article from Scotiabank & Google Cloud.
- I co-owned an Audiotour & Audioguides company: I was the managing partner for Sonusland Inc. A Florida-registered company dedicated to the creation of audio tours and audioguides for museums and other cultural institutions. I was in charge of the technical aspects of the company, from the backend needed to run the company to the development of the mobile applications that powered them. I also led all technical efforts of the dba. ImPlaces LLC., an online-only audiotour companion app. Example video of the Control Panel my team and I developed and the mobile application consuming this content, as well as Media Coverage for both ImPlaces and Sonusland at eMerge Americas 2015.
- I was part of the team leading the effort of infrastructure automation at DreamWorks: While working at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we turned HPE’s OneView – a VM and bare-metal vending machine solution – into DreamWorks Cloud, a fully automated infrastructure solution that allowed DreamWorks to spin up and down VMs and bare-metal machines at will, and in a fully automated fashion. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s & DreamWorks partnership in a video.
- I was part of the team that built Ubisoft’s in-house Kubernetes offering: With hundreds of teams and hundreds of production and even more non-production Kubernetes Clusters, I led and was part of the team that made it possible to automate, at scale, the creation of Kubernetes clusters for Ubisoft’s internal teams. Through a partnership with Rancher Labs (now owned by SUSE), we made it possible to spin up production-grade clusters in our own datacenter as well as public clouds in just minutes. SuSE’s Coverage of the partnership is here.
Technologies & Languages
Among the programming languages and technology stacks I work with, you’ll find:
- Go (Golang) programming, for backend services and tooling for DevEx.
- Some Rust as of recently (~1 year) for high-performance backend applications.
- VueJS for anything Frontend.
- JAMStack, for building static sites and applications.
I’m well versed in the following technologies:
- Kubernetes, from running applications in them to building tooling for them (operators, controllers, etc).
- ArgoCD & FluxCD, for GitOps.
- Jenkins X, Tekton, GitHub Actions, Woodpecker/Drone and other CI/CD tools.
- Docker, from building images to running them in production.
- Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, as well as their flavors of Kubernetes (EKS and GKE).
- OpenStack, for in-house private cloud solutions via bare-metal.
- Linux, with several CLI applications developed for it, check them out!