+++
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"
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




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 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.

And in the free time I have left, I game on my Steam Deck.

See what I've been up to on:
- [GitHub](https://github.com/jbowdre)
- [CounterSocial](https://counter.social/@john_b)

Securely chat with me via:
- [SimpleX Chat](/simplex/)


[^1]: Congrats? And also, *thank you.*