Howdy! My name is Ryan Baker, and welcome to my blog! For as long as I can remember, it’s been my goal to start a public blog and finally I’ve made it a reality. My goal is to populate it with great content to help people like myself, whether that’s learning or simply knowing they are not alone in the never ending world of change in the software and infrastructure world.
Bio
I grew up in the small town of Lyndon, Kansas with a graduating class of 36. I’ll never forget a certain day in second grade when I found a book in the library on BASIC programming. We had just gotten our first family computer and at the age of 8, I worked through the entire book over the course of the summer (sorry Mrs. Hurt for stealing that book, I really wish I still had it!), and wrote my own text driven “Chose your own adventure” game, similar to Zork. I was hooked, and the journey began. In high school, I continued my love for technology, but also fell in love with track and field, which ultimately led to several scholarship offers to run track in the 800m dash. However, I quickly learned that track at the collegiate level was a full time job on top of education, and decided to hang up my track spikes and trade them in for the text books (and computer monitors)
I graduated with a Computer Information Systems degree from Kansas State University in May of 2008. After college, I worked at Cerner Corporation for almost 11 years and gained a tremendous amount of experience across network, storage, and compute disciplines. I took on roles as a system engineer, software architect, and ultimately a lead technology architect managing a team of engineers running a large, multi-region, multi-availability zone OpenStack cluster while working with our development teams to modernize our core software on to cloud native architectures.
In 2018, I moved on to C2FO where I am currently a DevOps engineer working primarily on our Kubernetes deployment and cloud infrastructure that spans the globe across the three major public cloud providers.
Personally, I married my wonderful wife, Jennifer, in 2009, and we have two wonderful (yet wild) boys. We’ve lived in Kansas City, Missouri since we graduated college, and absolutely love it here. If you’ve ever had KC BBQ, you’ll know why!
Presentations
One of my favorite things to do is to share knowledge and experiences with the community! Check out a few of the presentations I’ve done at public conferences.
VMWorld 2017
OpenStack in the Real World: VMware Integrated OpenStack Customer
OpenStack Summit 2016
