The “about me” blurb is always a bit interesting to try to do — on the one hand, people want to know where you’re coming from; on the other, if you read the blog, you can figure it out. I’ll try to explain some of the big aspects I tend to blog about and where I’m coming from for each of them but take everything with a grain of salt

Life

I’m Jeremy Katz and I currently live outside of Boston, MA with my wife, our daughter and our two cats. I grew up in rural North Carolina and am finding that a more urban lifestyle fits me pretty well. I’m a self-professed geek and enjoy playing with a lot of technology related things and have for basically as long as I can remember. It’s fun both to figure out how things work as well as how to build exciting new things. Usually software, but from time to time the urge strikes me and I have to do silly things with hardware or just take something apart.

Work

I’m currently one of the first engineers at Stackdriver working on building tools to monitor and manage infrastructure running in the cloud.

I previously led the cloud automation and tooling team at HubSpot helping to wrangle our infrastructure and keep things running well.  This involves everything from building the images we run at EC2, tools to interact with the APIs of Amazon and other cloud providers, puppet to manage the running instances, application deployment tools and the monitoring needed to keep things running.

In a prior life, I was a developer at Red Hat, Inc. who does a lot of work on various things within the Fedora Project. If you’ve used a Red Hat distro, you’ve certainly used code that I’ve touched or written as I’ve been involved in a lot over time. Things within the distro which I’ve contributed a lot of code to include anaconda, mkinitrd, grub, yum, various system config tools, Xen, some of the underlying virt infrastructure, the livecds, some GNOME bits and pieces, and more. I was a founding member of the Fedora Board and FESCo although these days I only serve in an advisory role for both.

School

I am an alumnus of the Systems Design and Management (SDM) program at MIT. It’s a combination master’s degree given by the Engineering Systems Division and the Sloan School of Management. I wrote a fair bit about the program during my time there and graduated after finishing my thesis at the end of 2009 on how I saw web services getting many of the benefits of open source development without needing to actually release source code.  Undergrad, I graduated with a BS in Computer Science from NCSU. And I’m glad to be able to have been able to attend the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics for my last two years of high school which shaped a lot of where I’ve ended up.

Biking

As if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy pretty much 24×7, I’m also an avid cyclist and do some racing both on the road as well as enjoying cyclocross.  While I used to do most of my bike blogging here, I’ve since moved a bit of it to instead be hosted on another blog

Etc

Want to know more? Read for a bit, it’ll eventually make sense. At least, I hope so. If not, contact me and we’ll go from there.