This page was last updated 2022-11-11.

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.

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. These online presences are also me:

Professional

I work for Arctic Wolf as part of the R&D Infrastructure department. We focus on supporting continuous integration, continuous deployment, and a commitment to infrastructure-as-code.

Most recently, I provide management support to the developer experience, platform engineering and observability teams. Active projects on these teams involve Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), scaling out production infrastructure to multiple regions and points of deployment. I occasionally still write CloudFormation, Python, and shell scripts.

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.