Why I Joined Armory

Throughout my career, I have always worked in roles and for software companies that are focused on the availability and reliability of infrastructures and applications. I never really thought much about it until reading Simon Sinek’s book ‘Find Your Why’ at the suggestion of a manager who always had to understand ‘why’ something needed to be completed or exist. “Why does our software matter?”, “Why do our features and the experiences we provide matter?”. Not what or how, but why.

And the more I think about it, the more I connect it to my childhood. Growing up, I watched my dad work in the tech industry, including managing Application and Systems Engineering teams. This gave me an appreciation and interest in technology from a young age. But it also showed me the gritty details that isn’t always talked about as much: the pressure when working on critical systems. One prominent client of his was Nova Scotia Power, a large public utility where any kind of downtime was a big deal and significant impact on everyday people. Problems ate up a lot of his time, and he stayed up many nights dealing with issues. But technology was supposed to only be one aspect of his life. He was, afterall, a father with two kids.

My dad’s work experience had a profound impact on me. He was the parent with primary custody, so I saw the downstream effects of this in two ways. I watched my dad’s health suffer from the stress of keeping complex systems running; he endured chronic (and often debilitating) migraines and an eventual heart attack. We also lost time together as a family. Every work emergency meant less time with my brother and me doing family things, like enjoying the Canadian national pastime hockey. (Us siblings got really good at making grilled cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches though.)

These downstream effects of what unreliable software can do to people in the context of businesses and external to that context is my “why”. Nobody should have to be stressed over software updates and their (potentially negative) outcomes. People should be able to spend more time on the things they enjoy more.

In a software context, this means that the following need to be true:

• Infrastructure and applications are available and reliable
• Changes are easy to implement
• Developers can focus on innovation instead of managing deployments and “fighting fires.”

But, software, specifically software deployment, is a complex and manual process that leads to customer outages and less time spent on innovation. It has been and remains disruptive, time-consuming and unreliable.

That’s the reason joining Armory is more than just a career choice for me; it’s a personal choice that is deeply tied to my experiences growing up. I don’t want people to be stressed out over deploying their changes to production. I want to make the 3 am on-call pings that my dad endured be a thing of the past.

With Armory, I see a path moving toward software that helps developers of the world live better lives.

How is Armory doing that? We provide an easy-to-use software deployment platform that eliminates the need to migrate away from existing tools and minimizes disruption to your existing software delivery lifecycle. Developers can easily deploy new versions alongside live versions, Incrementally scale up new versions, enable manual reviews prior to scaling up, effortlessly rollback to an old version, and manage their deployment across multiple environments. In short, Armory is a multi-target intelligent deployment platform that allows developers to focus on building code rather than deploying it.

Our vision is to ‘unlock innovation through software.’ To achieve that, the Armory crew and I are creating and delivering software that’s helping developers achieve agility, availability, and reliability while (most importantly) being able to live better lives.