About

What I Do

By trade I’m a Site Reliability Engineer. When I’m not at work solving problems, I’m often out in the world avoiding my personal ones. I enjoy biking, hiking, climbing, photography, and geeking out about Nintendo games. I also like to churn the occasional quart of ice cream at home.

Where I’ve Been

I’ve definitely been bitten by the travel bug, though I haven’t been to many countries outside of the United States. As soon as normal travel resumes, and assuming another pandemic doesn’t hit soon, I’d like to visit a new country every year.

Countries Visited:

  • Spain (2007)
  • Italy (2007)
  • Japan (2016, 2018)
  • Canada (2019)

I’m an avid hiker and I’ve covered a little bit over 3000 miles of trail. Most of that was done on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019. (Which, by the way, was the coolest, toughest thing I’ve ever done. If you want to check out my journal of my trip with plenty of typos, click over to https://pct2019.jacobleistra.com.)

What I’m Up To

I’m still figuring out what my 30s will look like, but I’m pretty damn excited.

Professionally, I’d like to step up my development game and find an open source project I’m passionate about to contribute to and maintain. Meanwhile I’m continuing to develop my expertise and implementation of Site Reliability Engineering. Complex infrastructure systems are still super cool to me.

Personally, I’m hoping to cover another 3000 miles over the next few years–either on foot or on a bicycle. I’d like to visit Mexico, Colombia, and Peru. I’d like to perfect a few ice cream recipes (and daydream about getting my ice cream side project started). And maybe I’ll get a dog?