About Me
Hi, I’m Madeline Cowie! I live in Chicago with my partner Nicki, and I’ve worked in software development for about 10 years now. Most recently, I was the Lead Developer for a small agency.
Being the technical lead there gave me the opportunity to work on a wide variety of applications, as well as build a wide variety of skills beyond just coding. I’ve dealt with every layer of a full stack application and its deployment. I’ve done technical writing and client communication. I’ve collaborated with designers and mentored our junior and intermediate developers. I shaped our technology stack and internal tooling to deliver as much value as we could for the time spent. I ensured applications and their hosting environments were reliable enough that we did not need pager duty or off-hours work. Budgets notwithstanding, I’m proud at what we were able to deliver with our resources.
Building (and expanding!) my homelab has been a fun hobby of mine the last few years. It started off as a way to organize my digital life beyond a desktop without relying on the cloud, which it’s done well at. That was the carrot that led me down the path, and along the way I’ve learned much about virtualization, containerization, networking, ZFS and RAID storage, rack hardware and all sorts of little sysadmin gotchas that pop up.
Beyond the nerdy stuff, I love going out to catch bands, getting out for hiking and biking, and strikeouts by White Sox pitching! My vocals are an eternal work in progress, but I find it hard to resist an open karaoke machine. And I have aspirations of picking guitar back up. One day, Maddie, one day.
I hope to start sharing what I’ve learned here from my experiences, professionally and personally. For the community, as well as my own memory. And show off some fun stuff along the way!