Derrick Schommer

Principle Software Engineer at Mantium

I'm a principal python software developer with 22 years of experience in programming (not quite devops, but traditional software development). I love programming and designing in-house tools that do crazy custom things to test interesting (and hard to reproduce) scenarios. I've learned to build software tools and automation around some standard CI/CD solutions such as Jenkins (with a bit of groovy, but just enough to be dangerous). My true passion is software tools development, building tools to help production level software engineers get their job done more effectively and efficiently. That often means designing new tooling, building support documentation and training engineers on the tools. Then enhancing them as needed to meet new criteria and challenges. But, I also just love development and solving new problems, always trying to design solutions a few steps ahead. Planning, Designing, building the roadmap and then building out the ticket/epics to break down the hard problems into smaller ones in order to fully realize the issue, set manageable target dates, and crushing the problem. I've learned that most big problems can be solved with a solid design that gives you a chance to think through all the paths and scenarios before writing up a whole lot of code (which then turns into techdebt months later when you have work-around after work-around)