I am Carl Heinst, currently Automation Engineering Manager at G-Research, within our Infrastructure as a Service function.

I started my career in technology as a Windows system administrator, but following in the sage advice of PowerShell Author Don Jones, I decided to learn PowerShell (rather than exploring a career in the fast food industry).

I derived a passion for automation having spent far too much time early in my career clicking, Next, Next, Yes, Finish in Windows. The idea that this manual effort could be bypassed and that infrastructure environments could be deployed consistently and rapidly from code motivated me to focus on this area.

PowerShell lead to Python, Python to Ansible, Terraform and Jenkins.

Empowered by the fantastic access to learning resources and opportunities that GR provides to its staff, I have recently fallen to the dark side and moved from being a Senior Engineer to managing engineering teams.

It is my privilege to manage two of the most technically gifted teams I’ve ever encountered in my career, and whilst I don’t get to write as many automations as I would like, being able to draw upon Python to create presentations and visualisation has its uses.

From a personal perspective I love science fiction and combic book movies, which have been known to occassionally work their way into my presentations.