About NOT LEO
NOT LEO is the official tech blog and personality brand of Shane Heroux.
NOT LEO hosts editorial blogs on technology and our relationships with it. Sometimes it may take effort to see how a piece calls back in that direction, but if you stick around, I think you’ll understand.
Meet Shane Heroux
Neither my formal education nor my early adult work experiences were technology adjacent, and that was blissfully deliberate.
See, I love technology. My childhood was defined by the computers of the time and my closest friendships were formed through dialup BBS telecommunications. However, the best information available to me when certain decisions came up was that if you choose to do something as a career, it will devour your soul and consume any passion you had for doing it in the first place. So I earned my degree and began a career in Musical Theater and as it turns out, that information was only partially true.
a cute pic of me and my dad
While that first career gave me several years of experience learning how to not own many things and move a lot, I learned some important lessons along the way. Probably the most relevant of these was that I am not, in fact, Leo. If someone said I look like him, say from across a crowded room, I’m gonna take the W on that one.
Moving on. While rehearsing art songs and performing the classics of Broadway in the mid-nineties for college credit, I was holding down a work study job in faculty tech support. Now I already had the motive, but this provided me the opportunity to experiment with Linux (Slackware), building frankenstein routers and webmail servers with discarded Kingston NICs and orphaned Packard Bells. This, and a bit of serendipity in the form of a mid 90s online game provided the foundation and support I needed to transition into a tech career that ultimately led us here.
Beginning with a stint of graveyard BMS response and resetting email passwords in the NOC of a data center in downtown Denver, it wasn’t too long before they let me see daylight. Being promoted to Sr. Linux on the beeper rotation, I got to work both shifts sometimes. It was a fun chapter, I laughed and laughed. But as all chapters eventually do, that one had to end.
Thankfully a new, healthier role in consulting was around the corner. This eventually progressed to working with technology partners, first in a dedicated support function and finally to my current position in product integrations and collaborations. But most importantly, I write stories and develop technical relationships.
As I still work in the partner ecosystem which I love, working largely on the same day to day projects, I should mention what changed most recently. What inspired this website. It was the cosmic collision of two important (to me) realizations.
One is that an increasingly burdensome amount of time and head space has been consumed thinking about complex software systems and how human beings interface with them. The other is that I am surrounded by excellent nerds who daily inspire me to grow and contribute to the economies of progressive thought, and open source.
From toasters to Terraform, human beings ultimately operate the levers (albeit with increasingly more common AI abstraction) that move the world. These movements have consequences ranging from barely perceptible to profoundly impactful. None of my friends, also known to me as “my kids” and “my wife,” want to hear me talk about my thoughts on these matters, so I thought maybe you’d want to.
And if you’ve made it this far, the likelihood of you being down with my subject matter and style is high.
More about NOT LEO
Throughout all my misadventures, over 40+ years, I have in fact never even known anyone named Leo. I find this unlikely, but for real I bet you’ve met at least one and against all odds, I haven’t.
I’d like to. Someday probably will and I’ll have to rewrite this entire section. Maybe I’ll work with a Leo. We’ll have that cool “work buddies,” inside-joke relationship I haven’t experienced since back in the mid 2000s with my buddy Ben. He plays bassoon and has a real knack for hilariously mixing aphorisms. That’s another thing I get super nerdy on, but this isn’t that kind of blog so don’t get your hopes up.
Until that point, or one like it, I stand by the truth that to the best of my recollection I have not known a single Leonardo, Leontis, or anything like even a Lionel (which is a stretch) that could reasonably even be mistakenly or playfully abbreviated as Leo.
If you have met me in person, and if this topic came up, I told you a tall tale about the NOT LEO origin story. It evolves and I like to keep it fresh. The real beginnings are a bit pedestrian but fascinating to me, and if you want to know, ask me at coffee.
Boring stuff
This blog site runs on Linode via Caddy and Hugo. I’m testing analytics with Umami and GoatCounter right now but will probably settle on the latter.
I play with theme and layout changes live, in classic Brechtian style. If you encounter weirdness, congratulations!