update about page

content/about.md

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 +++
 title = "Hi, I'm John."
 description = "A brief introduction to me, this blog, and what you're likely to see here."
-aliases = ["tldr", "bio"]
-timeless = "true"
+timeless = true
 comments = false
 +++
 You've (somehow) managed to stumble upon my dark corner of the internet[^1].
 
-I'm currently a Cloud Platform Architect on a small Platform Engineering team within a very large corporation. Our team preaches the Good Word of *DevSecOps* and helps internal customers modernize the way they build, deploy, and ship products. I do a lot of work with
+![Me, +/- a few decades](/images/john.jpg)
 
+I've enjoyed programming since discovering I could alter variable values in [`GORILLA.BAS`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_%28video_game%29) on my dad's work computer to imbue the thrown bananas with enough explosive power to level the entire city. I thought, "hey, that's neat," and then spent much of my childhood free time learning how *else* I could bend computers to my will.
 
+Once I grew up[^2], I found a career in system administration, and I leveraged my passion for coding to write scripts to help me manage systems more efficiently. While managing a global-scale VMware environment, I was tasked with implementing [vRealize Automation](/series/vra8) (now "Aria Automation"). I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the start of my DevOps transformation. I started to think about infrastructure-as-code, and began using [HashiCorp Packer](https://github.com/jbowdre/packer-vsphere-templates) and a CI/CD pipeline to automatically build fully-up-to-date VM templates on a weekly cadence.
 
+I'm now part of a small platform engineering team within that same large corporation, focused on leveraging DevOps thinking and tools to help our internal customers modernize how they're operating IT, building code, and shipping products, while designing solutions to help them accomplish those goals. It's a great blending of my virtual infrastructure operations background, hobbyist development experience, and hunger for solving problems, and I enjoy solving interesting challenges at scale.
 
-By day, I manage a large virtualized environment, with a focus on leveraging cloud and automation technologies to make that task a bit easier. My big project from the past couple of years has been a VMware vRealize Automation implementation to streamline our server deployments, and I've been sharing some of what I've learned in that process here on Virtually Potato, primarily in the [vRA8 series of posts](/series/vra8). I don't have a strong development background (knowing just enough to be dangerous) so I do a lot of fumbling along the way, but I'm _generally_ make things work the way I want them to. And hopefully some of the notes I've made along the way might help someone else with their own projects!
-
-By night, I help out on Google's product support forums as a [Product Expert](https://productexperts.withgoogle.com/what-it-is), where I support Pixel phones, earbuds, and watches, as well as Chromebooks (primarily with Linux-related queries). Helping users troubleshoot their issues scratches my problem-solving itch, and it helps me learn more about the Google products I use.
+On my off time, I tinker with new [projects](/series/projects) in my little homelab and share some of those adventures here. I also help out on Google's product support forums as a [Product Expert](https://productexperts.withgoogle.com/what-it-is), where I support Pixel phones, earbuds, and watches, as well as Chromebooks (primarily with Linux-related queries). Helping users troubleshoot their issues scratches my problem-solving itch, and it helps me learn more about the Google products I use.
 
 On weekends, I race my daily-driven 2014 Subaru BRZ in local [autocross events](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwzr4uKY-x-EwCv-rWNGefdikuW6Oy9O_) or wrench on my 1974 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
 
@@ -28,4 +28,5 @@ Securely chat with me via:
 - [SimpleX Chat](/simplex/)
 
 
-[^1]: Congrats? And also, *thank you.*
+[^1]: Congrats? And also, *thank you.*
+[^2]: A bit. I'm still in the "fake it until you make" it phase of adulthood.