Donna Alexandra

Who am I?

I'm Donna, my pronouns are she/her.

Originally from Northern Ireland, I've been living in Scotland for almost 10 years. ⛰️

I'm a Senior Site Reliability Engineer on the Foundations team at GitLab.

About me

• 🎓 I have a BSc in Business Information Technology from Queen's University Belfast.
• 🐾 I have two dogs: Skye (Border Collie) and Lewis (Golden Retriever).
• 📹 I have an adventure YouTube channel.
• 😅 I started my career in tech by accident. Ask me about it!
• 💻 Whilst I specialise in infrastructure, I've navigated the full tech stack.
• 🔥 On my first oncall shift (of my career) a datacentre literally caught on fire.
• 📈 I've automated the deployment of the largest CloudFoundry PaaS in the world (supporting over 1.5k production applications).
• ✨ I've "Sparked API Joy" by standardising CircleCI's API Infrastructure.

Hobbies

• Hiking (Munro Bagging: climbing all 282 mountains over 3,000ft in Scotland).
• Videography (sharing adventures on a small YouTube channel).
• Aerial Arts (trapeze, aerial hoop, etc).
• Running.
• Travelling.
• Gardening.
• DIY.

How I work

I work as asynchronously as possible, but I'm usually near a computer between 9am and 6pm UTC (give or take an hour). My calendar is kept up to date for ease of scheduling.

☕ Coffee chats are always welcome.

More specifically:

• Overcommunication: I work in public channels where possible and will direct work related DMs to the appropriate public channel where possible.
• Celebrate the smol wins: No matter how small of an achievement, I will always relish the opportunity to celebrate my team.
• Whimsy: I like to inject personality and a bit of whimsy into my work where I can, either through emoji reactions or adding GIFs when reviewing MRs (Thank GIF It's Friday).
• A Safe Pair of Hands: I can be trusted to do the right thing, and ensure everyone is kept updated as I go.