I’m Melissa — an infrastructure and DevOps engineer with a habit of gravitating toward challenging experiences.
On the career side, I’ve worked as an Infrastructure Engineer, Cloud Engineer, and DevOps Engineer, but the thread running through all of it is the same: bridging development and operations, so developers can get their code out the door without anyone losing sleep over it. That’s meant designing CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and Terraform that give teams fast, automated confidence in build quality. From my degree in Integrated Engineering at UBC, I’ve learned how to solve problems where there was no text book answer. We learned a little bit about everything, but not enough about anything there, and it was up to us to figure out the rest.
Outside of work, I like putting myself somewhere remote enough that stopping being non-negotiable, teamwork can be life saving, and challenge is constant. Backpacking is my summer thing — the biggest trip so far was 10 days through Akshayuk Pass in Auyuittuq National Park, Nunavut, in the arctic tundra where the closest search and rescue help was from Jasper (Alberta), plus the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island’s Pacific Rim National Park. I’m also a Paddle Canada Level 2 kayaker, with trips through the Broken Group Islands, Haida Gwaii, and the Gulf Islands. In winter I ski, and I’m a certified CSIA Level 1 instructor — partly because I like skiing, partly because there is always room for improvement.
The biggest trip on record, though, was two months bike touring across Europe on folding bikes, starting in Amsterdam and ending in Gibraltar. I did stops along the way in Belgium, France, and Spain and visited several friends in Europe.
If there’s a pattern here, it’s that I don’t stop at easy. Whether that’s a production system, a mountain pass, or a border crossing on a bike that folds in half, I’d rather push boundaries and seek adventure than to stay comfortable. You could say, continuous growth is my hobby.