About Will Button

Oof. About me, huh? Ok, let's do this.

Background
Will Button
First and foremost, I feel incredibly grateful to make a living doing what I love to do. There are a lot of things you can do in life to make a buck and I know that sometimes you have to do what you have to do to put food on the table so I take time each day to express gratitude that I'm able to do so while doing what I love.
Not everyone gets to say that.
I grew up in a small town in Texas where I graduated 5th in my high school class.
There were only 6 of us, but that's not important. The important part is I was Top Five, baby!
Achievement Unlocked: Stress Management
From there I joined the Navy and became a Nuclear Engineer and part of the pre-commission crew aboard the USS George Washington. This served as the foundation for not only my troubleshooting skills (kind of important when operating a nuclear reactor), but also my ability to remain calm under pressure, and to learn vast amounts of information in a short period of time.
I didn't realize at the time how valuable these skills would be for me.
Will Button
After the Navy, I went through a few different career paths before finding myself here. They included
  • Journeyman Electrician
  • Heavy Metal Guitarist
  • Telephone System Installer
  • Network Cabling Installer
  • Database Administrator
  • System Administrator
  • Software Engineer
Eventually I found myself using my sysadmin and software engineering skills at the same time. Later I learned this was a real thing called "DevOps".
Noted.
At one point while living near Bakersfield, California a buddy of mine mentioned a band was looking for a guitarist. That band would later go on to become Korn.
You're reading this and I'm not living in a mansion in Hollywood, so you can guess how the audition turned out.
Oh well.
Korn
Fitness
I'm really into fitness. If you're not, that's cool too. This is just what works for me. It started out as mountain biking in Northern Idaho with friends. One of my friends was a medic. Part of their responsibility was patrolling the local 24 hour mountain bike race each year. In order to provide 24 hours of coverage, he asked me to take a few laps as part of his medic crew. I had never seen a 24 hour race before, much less been part of one.
Rugged Mania
Achievement Unlocked: Endurance Racing
Part of the people I met that weekend weren't on a team. They were racing solo. Twenty four hours on a mountain bike.
I wanted in on that action.
The problem was, you had to be approved to race solo due to the danger of the activity. The only way to get approved was to have a resume of endurance and someone to sign off on your skills. This sign-off thing would come back later in life, specifically around how I'm building leetproof.com With some help and advice from a friend, I learned that the common method for overcoming this problem was to enter as a two-person team and race as both members of the team.
I had one name to register under: mine. I needed a second name. Taking inspiration from the band Anthrax and their song Dallabnikufesin, I created the name Willie Rekibnikufesin.
This would later come to serve as my username for many early Internet logins. These days, it's pretty much defunct with the exception of my Github profile name.
After several years as a semi-pro mountain bike racer, I started looking for something new. I stumbled on a new thing just starting called CrossFit. I tried it, I liked it, and after doing it for several years, got my CFL1 certification to begin coaching. That came with some unexpected side effects.
Achievement Unlocked: Communication
The interesting thing about coaching CrossFit is you have people moving weights around. Many of them have never done this in their life. At the same time, put them in a room with someone who has more experience, and as a result, lifts more weight.
It's a recipe for injury if you aren't attentive. As a coach, I had mere seconds to identify someone about to make a mistake and correct it.
But it gets better: you've only got seconds to figure out how this person communicates, break through the mental chatter going on in their head, and deliver your message.
Is this person an audible communicator?
A visual one?
A tactile communicator? And if so, how do you communicate this way in a stressful situation?
I coached CrossFit for five years. In the end I walked away with better communication skills, which come in handy to this day while managing incidents and outages.
Who would have thought?
Other Stuff
There's probably other stuff, but I think you get the idea. My wife will probably ridicule me and say "How could you not mention...?"
I'll shrug and smile.
Thanks for reading and be sure to reach out if there's anything I can help with.