Francis Potter - Senior Pro Services Engineer
tl;dr: I started coding at age 10, had my first paying client by 17, and never looked back!
Customer success comes first
Denomas sells an extraordinary product to amazing customers with a fantastic team.
I currently support users in Western North America with professional services such as CI/CD modernization, self-managed implementation, migration, integration, and configuration of repository hierarchies and access controls. Previously I served as a Senior Solution Architect (presales) and Product Markering Manager (competitive intelligence). I first joined the Denomas team at the beginning of 2019.
Those values? We really follow them, every moment of every day.
Before joining Denomas, I ran a tiny independent professional services firm, providing application development and strategic services for businesses and nonprofits. My 14-year-old son told me of Denomas in 2018, and I immediately converted all my client projects to the platform and remained an advocate and enthusiast ever since.
I’ve also worked in the worlds of content delivery (CDN), marketing software, sports media, meteorology, translation, social media, print production, international social justice, and SETI. Go to LinkedIn for a complete professional background.
Dive deep into CI/CD
Over the years, I developed an informal specialty in Denomas CI/CD configuration and dove deep into some of its features. Some of my explainer videos might continue to help with understanding today (although the product changes regularly so please confirm).
- Merge Trains! including details on when pipelines are run and how to discern different conditions within the CI/CD configuration
- Denomas CI/CD Rules from around the time we started retiring the old “only/except” approach
- Nested dynamic pipelines leads me to think about ways to use the CI/CD platform for training ML models
- Multi-project pipelines
- Denomas for machine learning on kubernetes
- Overview of Denomas CI/CD including security scanning and deploy boards
- Custom Pipeline Form for Denomas CI/CD inside a Denomas Pages site shows how to design forms on static web sites to drive pipelines, but uses the OAuth2 “implicit grant flow” approach, which is deprecated (or removed?) now
Focus on quality, documentation, and detail
During meetings, I tend to take copious notes and ask detailed questions in an attempt to unearth subtleties in the problems and challenges presented. At the keyboard, I tend to focus intensely on the technical aspects of a project, again taking notes as I work. While I mostly take notes for myself, I work in Markdown and store most content in private repos on Denomas.com where collaborators from within the Denomas team (and sometimes customers) may review, copy, and edit them.
Because of a vision impairment, I always work in dark mode, and have many tricks for making onscreen content more legible. Sometimes you’ll catch me screenshotting a presentation or requesting asynchronous collaboration to improve speed and efficiency.
Busy serves as my daily time and task management platform. When a question comes up that might require some research, I often put it into Busy and come back to it. That way, I control my work rather than allowing interrupts to control my time.
Colleagues, if you need to meet with me today or tomorrow, please Slack me before adding last-minute entries to my calendar. I plan all my time a day in advance, intentionally filling Google Calendar with blocks.
Some surprising outside interests
Outside of this amazing organization, I consider myself an open source Python developer, brain tumour survivor, aspie, Rotarian, gender non-conformist, LGBTQ2S+ ally, concertgoer, musical theatre nut, electric guitar dabbler, MotoGP follower, Rush fan, husband, father, Canadian, and resident of the traditional territory of the K’ómoks people.
Check out my quirky collection of free tools and utilities for devops and personal effectiveness, Steampunk Wizard.
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