Hi There, my name is Aaron Nichols. I’ve been doing various technology related jobs for over 18 years and am glad to say that each year they get more and more challenging & I am continuing to learn. I really enjoy what I do, but I learn fast & like variety – so I’ve managed to hold a variety of different roles. Mostly though – my skills and passion fall into a few major areas:

• Systems Engineering – This is what I love, building things and working with other folks to make them better. I am never content to understand how one box works – I need to understand how the system works together & how little things can have broad and cascading effects.

• IT/Operations – This is my bread and butter, and what I keep coming back to. I love this work and I love being very close to where the action is. I mostly focus on System Administration, but I’m a competent Network administrator & can occasionally reboot windows machines.

  • Software Development culture / process and practice. I spend a lot of time thinking about & studying how development teams work. I care a lot about this. I’ve joined a number of smaller orgs to help them establish a positive and fast moving development process and I very much enjoy talking about this topic with anyone who will listen.

This blog started as a way for me to share my thoughts on how security and operations can be integrated in smaller orgs. As interesting as this study was, it’s no longer a real focus of mine. I’m focused on the 3 bullets above and doing my best to help anyone I can with those things.

If you want to follow me on twitter – @anichols

If you want to look at my linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/anichols

If you want to try to chat, I am on a few public Slacks – notably the hangops and Rands Leadership Slacks.

Sending bits to my browser is also an option via anichols at trumped dot org

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What’s in a name? _Operation Bootstrap is what we’re trying to do – we’re trying to get Operations started right. BS in Operations in what we’re trying to get rid of – keep it to a minimum and focus on the task at hand. If you feel the way I do about doing this work, it’s not a job. You are putting your thumbprint on every change you make to the infrastructure, good or bad. OpsBS embodies the good and bad in that.