FormAssembly Teammate Highlight: Raymond Tai

How well do you know the awesome people behind FormAssembly? This series is the place to learn all about our incredible teammates. This week we’re profiling Raymond Tai, Infrastructure Operations Engineer.
Name: Raymond Tai
Title: Infrastructure Operations Engineer
With FormAssembly Since: September 2017

1. What interested you about FormAssembly in the first place?

The people are very open and friendly, the technology is on the leading edge with AWS, and the ability to work offsite from anywhere, anytime is great.

2. What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Learning new techniques and technologies and sharing prior experience from working at tech and enterprise companies. The Soft Layer to AWS migration was a great learning experience.
Training on FormAssembly was also fun and in-depth at the user and infrastructure levels and I’m looking forward to digging deeper into it.

3. What excites you most about your position and growth opportunity at FormAssembly?

Seeing and contributing to this company’s ongoing growth and transition into AWS. Learning how to remotely collaborate with people at various times and work locations.

4. What are you looking forward to achieving at FormAssembly?

I enjoyed being involved with migrating from Soft Layer and expanding AWS infrastructure, and I’m looking forward to working with knowledgeable people from various teams, and getting to know the client base.

5. What unique qualities do you bring to the FormAssembly team?

As a former DevOps technical lead at my prior job, I’m hoping grow this movement within FormAssembly. If you google for DevOps, you’ll come across the CALMS methodology:

• C – support a Culture where everyone works together from various teams on common goals; little to no islands or silos
• A – Automate everything from code to infrastructure for debugging, auditability and recoverability. Use automation orchestration tools like Jenkins and AWS systems management to glue it all together into a CI/CD/CD pipeline
• L – implement Lean practices around keeping work batch sizes small, visualizing work in progress and grooming the work backlog
• M – provide Measurements and feedback for improvements
• S – Share your ideas, be receptive and expand on others ideas

Many of these ideas are already in place, so it’s a matter of identifying gaps and expanding from there.

6. What are some of your favorite activities outside of work?

I like going out for long walks … to the pub for drinks with my friends. I also enjoy going to Meetups like Hackernests and Elasticsearch.

7. What’s something not a lot of people know about you?

I organize and maintain the Kitchener-Waterloo DevOps Meetup. It has over 100 members from various disciplines – QA, developers, sys admins.

8. If you were a breakfast cereal, what would you be and why?

Cheerios! The name makes me happy.

9. Who was your role model as a child?

The KoolAid character because he busts through walls to hand out sugary drinks.

10. What’s your spirit animal?

My Chinese animal is the monkey who thrives in chaos and change.
Enjoy learning about our team members? Check out this previous teammate highlight featuring Krystle Scott, Customer Support Specialist.