Violet Olds

Issue 04

The lore.

A nonlinear career. A consistent obsession with resilient systems, useful technology, and the people holding everything together.

Previously on: Violet's career

Emergency management taught me what resilience actually means.

Long before platform engineering, I worked in disaster recovery and public administration. That experience shaped how I think about infrastructure: failures are rarely just technical, preparedness is a team sport, and the people closest to the problem usually know more than the process gives them credit for.

Since then I've been a technical consultant, founder, client partner, operations leader, program manager, community organizer, and persistent translator between humans and systems. The titles changed. The work underneath them did not.

Atomic
energy.

Human
heart.

Mother
knows best.

The throughline was there all along.

Degrees, credentials, awards & side quests

How the weird little career connects.

Selected evidence—not every webinar badge I have ever earned. The string is decorative. The throughline is not.

Original purple and yellow graffiti-style osprey sticker representing Violet's University of North Florida alma mater

  • Education / Foundation

    BA, Political Science

    University of North Florida · History minor

  • Education / Systems

    Master of Public Administration

    University of North Florida · Public policy, evaluation, emergency management, ethics, and organizational behavior

  • Award / Receipt

    IAEM Student Poster Competition

    Second place for cell-phone-based Public Assistance disaster assessments

  • Product / Translation

    Software Product Management

    University of Alberta

  • Scholarship / Community

    Edie Windsor Coding Scholar

    Lesbians Who Tech

  • Leadership / Humans

    Inclusive & Ethical Leadership

    University of South Florida Muma College of Business

  • Resilience / Engineering

    Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner

    Gremlin · with additional DevOps and SRE study

  • Public systems / Design

    Human-Centered Design for Public Professionals

    InnovateUS

  • Critical infrastructure / Obviously

    Humor: A Leader’s Guide to Connection, Safety and Trust

    LinkedIn Learning · Yes, it was actually good.

  • Making work move

    Agile, Scrum & Technical Program Leadership

    Scrum Alliance, Atlassian, LinkedIn Learning, and SAFe coursework

  • Responsible technology

    Responsible AI Foundations Professional Certificate

    All Tech Is Human · plus AI prompt-engineering study

Operating principles

  1. Clarity over theater.Make the work visible. Name the tradeoffs. Skip the performance of certainty.
  2. Resilience over heroics.Build organizations that can bend, learn, recover, and keep going without burning people out.
  3. People are part of the system.Technical decisions are organizational decisions. Design accordingly.
  4. Joy is infrastructure.Humor, play, and care are not distractions from serious work. They help sustain it.

Available for select consulting, advisory & speaking work

Bring me a resilient-systems problem, a room that needs translating, or a really good idea.

Bring me a good problem