I (Kevin Holmes) formed elyclover.com in 2023. It’s a personal site to showcase my work and thoughts I’ve accumulated over the last few decades. You can see how it’s hosted here.
After spending over 13 years starting and running an IoT PaaS tech business while experiencing the highs and lows of the startup world, I was ready for a change of pace in 2020 as the Coronavirus Pandemic changed the world around us.
I have since started a wonderful family with my wife, Stephanie, that brings me tremendous joy and endless smiles daily. I have learned more about patience and listening since having children than I ever thought possible in my early and tentative years.
After reaching a consensus with my business partners and shuttering CarmaLink in early 2021, I began looking for new opportunities. I found an exciting business in the Capitol District of Upstate New York named Jahnel Group. They are a software consulting business with an incredible culture. I was fortunate enough to land a Lead DevOps consulting role with them on a project for Bethesda Softworks that included a large-scale AWS security remediation project post-Microsoft acquisition. Jahnel Group had many talented software developers but not so many “old school” systems engineering people like me who had racked servers, designed highly available networks, could write code, build user stories and run teams. I passed their live coding tests with considerable anxiety and accepted their offer. I was back to working for someone else again.
This period in 2021 was an exciting time for me. I joined Jahnel Group’s Open Source Club and took home 1st place in that year’s Code Wars challenge. I had so much fun getting out of my startup’s world and working with more diverse groups of people worldwide. As a life-long fan of the Fallout franchise it was absolutely epic to be able to contribute at Bethesda in a big way. I competed in my first team Hackathon with an ML product offering, and loved every minute (our team also won!) The most valuable part of this experience regarding my personal growth was discovering the joy of technical consulting and realizing why I loved it so much.
After this exciting experience at Jahnel Group wearing my consulting hat, I went into a FTE role working for Synack as a Senior DevOps Engineer. What made this experience at Synack so amazing was the flexibility of my duties. I wrote thousands of lines of GitHub Actions, built secure internal Actions registries, highly performance CI pipelines using matrix build strategies, and supported the GitHub Actions stack powering all of this using K8s (GKE specifically) to run this very high scale GH Actions environment with the Open Source Actions Runner Controller which has now become a popular, GitHub owned project. I was also able to contribute to multiple Open Source projects at this time, including Argo Workflows which was used to operate a highly scalable K8s native vulnerability discovery stack that uncovered hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities a day within critical infrastructure. I was also able to contribute directly to multiple niche Golang projects such as a daemonset that modified underlying K8s nodes networking stacks to enable the high-scale vuln discovery system to operate over private links and VPNs into customer networks.
After a year of this, I wanted to look for something less DevOps oriented (and frankly, less on-call). This is when I found Own and took a job as a Principal Engineer on the Site Reliability Engineering team with a focus on Observability. I spent just about a year and a half there supporting a high growth startup environment. Much of my time was spent trying to spread the good word of Observability and how it could help solve our scaling woes (or at least make them easier/faster to diagnose). I also took over ownership of a higly complex logging environment with strict data residency requirements that was spread across eight geographic regions including a FedRAMP Moderate authorized instance. This was a nice re-entry into some Java tech we had used at CarmaLink many years earlier (Lucene) but this time not as Solr but as OpenSearch. As with most things technology related - things change. Own was then acquired by Salesforce officially in early 2025 and my journey again has shifted.
I am now working as a LMTS on a team mostly dedicated to Observability and Platform Engineering. The focus is to enable Engineering teams to have greater service ownership and improved resiliency as we navigate the process of integrating into one of the world’s largest (?) software companies. We are in good company though with Slack, Heroku, Tableau, and now Informatica. The age of AI Agents and LLMs is upon us and it seems like an interesting place to be given the timing of everything. I am looking forward to seeing what I can make of this new transition.
As times and roles change, I realize my love of helping customers overcome their challenges is what drove me every day at CarmaLink and continues to drive me today. It wasn’t the allure of a startup and riches, but the challenge and warm fuzzy feeling that comes from successfully delivering effective solutions that solve real problems for real people.