About

This page was last updated 2026-03-02.

Personal

I’m Jake Billo, a tech enthusiast and mammal wrangler: cat, dog and small human.

The variety of posts on this site should give you an idea of my personal interests, but perhaps the most obvious is my enthusiasm for cruising and documenting the process with a Canadian focus. Whether it’s a review, pre-travel planning, or obsessive recounting of daily onboard experiences, it’s good to be able to reflect on and catalog vacations in a place I own. I hope some of the information contained in these long-winded posts is useful, or at least interesting.

I also have a very rudimentary Cruise Docs site that has daily schedules and programming, menus, notices, and other paperwork from some of the cruises I’ve taken. This also lets me experiment with some different technologies (eg: GitHub Actions and Pages, Hugo, and now some GenAI tooling.)

Interspersed with cruise content, you’ll probably find some attempted solutions to obscure tech problems.

Getting in Touch

The best way to contact me is by email: jake at jakebillo dot com. I do have other online presences, some key ones being:

Professional

I’ve worked for Arctic Wolf as part of the R&D Infrastructure department since September 2013. I am a strong advocate for infrastructure-as-code, AWS, and resiliency appropriate to the situation.

Most recently, I provide leadership and guidance to the foundational public cloud, compute platform, and observability teams. These groups provide product-aligned development teams with a secure, stable, and compliant platform to build their software on. We’re multi-cloud but a majority of the work supports environments based on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). I occasionally write CloudFormation and Python for auditing and reporting tools. I also work closely with Product Management to plan, communicate, and adjust our roadmap.

Before Arctic Wolf Networks, I was with BlackBerry/RIM for over six years in various positions, and resigned in September 2013 to join Arctic Wolf. The most time here was spent as a Systems Engineering Specialist, focusing on software loading/update services. In this role, I operated and maintained small-scale versions of nearly every piece of BlackBerry infrastructure.

Prior to RIM, I worked for IBM as an information developer/technical writer for WebSphere Development Studio Client – a suite of tools for iSeries/System i servers. Before that, I spent some time at Maplesoft in the programs marketing department, and wrote small scripts to ensure email campaign compliance.