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Sarah Elkins |
About Me |
I am a proud mother of 2 children and have been married for a long time (cough cough 25 years) to a wonderful husband. We are also blessed with 2 wonderful granchildren. Being empty nesters with kids that live in different areas of the country, my husband and I actually decided to have a semi-nomadic life and are full-time RVers.
Originally from the lakes area of Kentucky, I love to travel and see other parts for the country and world. We usually will spend some time fishing anywhere we go, as this is one of our favorite hobbies. I also love to read. Some of my favorites are the Harry Potter books. My family and I are Potter-Heads!!
I have been at GitHub in Services for the past four years and love, absolutely love 💖, every minute of it. I started out as an Implementation Engineer working with a large govermnemnt customer to design and implement their large scale development transformation to move from legacy tools into GitHub. This included:
- The creation of the GitHub Handbook
- Collaboration and development of tandards and policies
- Onboarding pathways with assets and instructions
- Workshops and webinars to teach their developers, program managers, and leadership how GitHub would improve their developement lifecycle, security, and practices
As a testament to the groundwork my team and I put in place, we still have a team enbeded with this same customer that continues to grow their usage of GitHub and all of the newest features we have introduced in the last four years as a full developement platform.
Two years ago, I moved from being an Implementation/DevOps Engineer into the Public Sector Engagement Manager role and have since been elevated to a Senior Engagement Manager. In this role, I still worked with our Public Sector customers and Services team. However, instead of being focused on only a few customers. I was now in charge of planning the resourcing, timing, and scheduling of services being delivered to all the Public Sector customers with everyone on my team. I have grown in this role by:
- Standardizing the process for how we, as a Services Organization, process contracting deliveries out to our Partners
- Working with our Partners to provide onboarding and delivery enablement
- Standardizing the many facets and tasks that an Engagement Manager needs to do for each services delivery
- Assiting with scoping and pre-sales discussions with customers to confirm the customer gets the correct services to fulfill their individual needs
- Owning the services engagment from pre-sales, to resourcing, during the project kickoff with the customer, through delivery, and to completion and billing
- Building documentation and enablement for Engagement Managers and Project Managers on the various roles and responsibilities within their positions
I have worked for Hewlett Packard Enterprise for over 3 years as a Product Development Engineer. In this role, I have been responsible for the design and implementation of third party Source Code Management (SCM) tools used by the company’s internal developers. These tools have included Team Foundation Server (on-premise), GitHub Enterprise and CollabNet TeamForge (Subversion/Gerrit). I have also been an avid user of the many Build/Deploy, DevOps and Quality Management tools that are also hosted by my team, including Jenkins, FlowDock, Hubots and Docker.
I am also an internal advocate for DevOps practices and Social Coding. In this role, I have presented and shared best practices and my experiences to other developers and business groups within the company. I enjoy showing our developers how DevOps can make their jobs easier by using automation, pipelines, APIs and ChatOps to complete repetitive tasks. I enjoy showing someone how something as simple as creating a Pull Request in GitHub Enterprise or sending a message to a Hubot in a ChatOps tool can start a chain of automate events making their jobs easier. I also like to stress to our developers that if a job can be automated, there is less of a chance of “Human Error” being introduced.
My background is not that of traditional IT. For six years prior to starting my career at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, I worked as a Telecommunications Operator, which to most people is an Emergency 911 Operator. While in this position, I was responsible for taking emergency calls, gathering information from the callers, passing that information on to the appropriate agency/agencies (Police, Fire, Rescue, EMS, etc.), de-escalating situations and giving the caller instructions over the phone. All of my actions could have been the difference in life or death for not only the callers, but also the emergency responders. This was, by no means, an easy job. It takes patience, the ability to calm others (even if you are not), and the ability to multi-task. Many times, I would be listening to a caller, giving instructions to emergency responders and typing notes in the recording system all at the same time. As you can imagine, it was a stressful job. However, I enjoyed every minute of it and found it to be very rewarding. The last nine months at my last Telecommunications position, I was also the Supervisor and was charged with creating the training materials and program for future Telecommunications Operators.
I want to continue to grow my skills and watch the lightbulbs light up for the people and teams that I interact with. Organization and process definition is a passion of mine. I am drawn to look at life from the perspective of how the outcome has been achieved and how could that be made better and have been doing this my whole life with EVERYTHING. Finding ineffeciencies in a process and working to resolve and streamline the process with as many low-touch steps as possible sometimes drives my husband crazy. But, it is something I love to do and find relaxing.