About Eris Outpost

I'm an IT Infrastructure Engineering Manager in the Midwest with a Political Science degree, an in-progress MBA, and over a decade in the industry. This site lives at the intersection of engineering leadership, neurodivergent parenting, and the creative projects I build to keep my brain engaged after hours.

The common thread is systems thinking applied to everything: managing engineering teams, raising kids (one with autism spectrum disorder), building homelabs, and trying to keep the whole operation running without burning out. I write about what's worked, what hasn't, and what I'm still figuring out. If you're an engineering manager who is also a parent navigating neurodivergence at home, this site was written for you.

Neurodivergent Parenting Through a Systems Lens

I'm a parent of two elementary-aged kids. One has a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder level 2. I will never mention my children by name on this site, and I won't share details that could identify them to people who don't already know our family.

What I will share is what I've learned managing the operational reality of neurodivergent parenting: the routines, the systems, the sensory accommodations, the IEP meetings, and the places where management frameworks from work translate (imperfectly, sometimes usefully) to home. I write about incident response applied to meltdowns, capacity planning for family energy, observability for early intervention, and making invisible parenting work visible. The perspective is mine as a parent and a systems thinker, not theirs as children. They'll tell their own stories when they're ready.

The Professional Path

The career arc: help desk at a managed service provider in 2012, systems administration, DevOps and cloud engineering, and into infrastructure engineering management. I started with CompTIA certifications and a home lab, taught A+ and Network+ at a community college in the evenings, and spent over a decade navigating the technology transitions from on-premises Windows administration to cloud-native infrastructure as code. I manage a remote team of engineers working on infrastructure and operations in a mid-size enterprise environment.

The leadership writing on this site comes from that experience: the messy, human, rarely-textbook reality of managing people, projects, and priorities. Growing engineers, running effective one-on-ones, making work visible, writing documentation as a leadership practice, and using AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement.

What I Write About

Eris Outpost is a weekly blog (The Dispatch), a curated reading list (The Library), and a small merch experiment (The Commissary). The writing covers five core areas:

I publish weekly, batch-create content in advance, and try to write with the same specificity I'd use in a technical document: show the work, acknowledge what didn't go well, and scope claims to my own experience rather than prescribing universally.

Start Here

If you're new and looking for a starting point, these collections group related posts by theme:

Find Me Here