Why Cap'n?

First of all, I am a rambler.  I type what comes to mind, when it comes to mind.  This is a part of my neuro-spiciness.

On with the show.

Cap'n (aka captain) has been a nickname for a long time.  Every new position I take, someone ends up calling me captain.  I normally end up taking the reigns of the project and give it structure.

It first started when I worked in a well known franchise fast food fish restaurant.  Starting as a night fry cook, through dinner rushes and closing 5 days a week.  This provided me just enough free time to learn all positions in the store, and fill those positions as people needed days off.  This includes becoming an shift manager and then acting assistant manager of the store while the store general manager was replaced.

If you have worked in any fast food restaurant using deep fryers, you know that oil gets everywhere.  To keep the store in a hygienic state deep cleans were required every few weeks.  The deep cleans that require moving everything, scrubbing the walls, ceilings, and floors with degreaser.

This store taught me multiple things, including how to be a "good" manager.  Some managers micro-manage to get things done, or rule with an iron fist.  I still ask myself "Why do people thing yelling gets things done faster?".  It isn't like the higher decibel makes things go faster.

I managed with a helping hand.  Instead of yelling, I asked how I could help speed up their tasks, or if I could take over a task for them to make their night smoother.  Workers became extensions of my own hands.  Thinking them as a part of myself, it was my obligation to keep food fresh, everything clean, and customers happy.  If I can keep my "hands" happy, that ended up extending to the customers with an authentic smile and laugh.

Moving away from fast food when my son was born, I was hired by a website hosting provider.  Their outlook on customer interactions peaked my interest, and their reach into OpenSource software made it my perfect job.  This is where OpenStack come into play, and broadened my respect of the OpenSource community.  Almost 12 years with that company, I had multiple positions from front line technical support all the way to developer and automation specialist.

After the first few months of working with this company, I noted that there was a lot of manual tasks that were being done.  Automating and scripting those tasks became my hobby.  This sped up customer requests and manual ticket creation.  One of my tasks at the time was to create a notification ticket based on the email alert notification we received from a 3rd party service.  This took almost 3/4 of each work week, to validate alerts and then create the tickets.  After digging into Python, I was able to run a script on a reoccurring schedule to fully remove that task.  After adding some monitoring to the task, it became full hands off.  After a few requested modifications, including creating a whitelist for customers, I was able to move onto other tasks to automate.

After some time, the name Cap'n started popping up again.

I have had many different nicknames over the years, but Cap'n keeps coming back.

The final ironic piece of this story comes when I start taking on supporting older scripts and programs from the company.  I started seeing the name Major as the primary maintainer/creator of most of them.

I guess Captain will always come after Major.



Location: Texas, United States

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