What Are You Thankful For?

Pass the turkey, slice the pie and your arrays! As the days grow longer and colder and the new year approaches, we asked ten of our engineers to share what they were thankful for this holiday season.

Richard Goldman, Principal Process Manager

I am thankful for open source developers contributing to applications for education and humanitarian purposes; but I'm particularly thankful to the professional engineers and tech writers of Capital One who lend their time for such important open source development.

Tanu McCabe, Senior Distinguished Engineer

I am thankful for the continuous learning opportunities to be a myth busting architect; exploring new technologies in collaboration with like minded SMEs to figure out how best to leverage them at scale.

Gokul Prabagaren, Master Software Engineer

I am thankful for all the developers and tech content writers who take time to share their thoughts and knowledge on what drives our company and industry forward. I was really inspired by a lot of Capital One contributors like Jimmy Ray, Tanu McCabe, and Chris Fauerbach to start writing on what I did/learnt from my experiences and sharing them as my own blogs.

Matthew Burke, Master Software Engineer

Here at the ole Yeast I Could Do bakery, we are thankful for the AWS Swift Lambda Runtime. It allows us to write lambda functions in Swift without having to deal with all the mishegas of running ldd, using Docker, writing JavaScript shims — by the time I finish setting up all that infrastructure, the pumpkin pies are burned!

Amber Smirnow, Manager, Product Management

I am grateful for the opportunity to volunteer with organizations focused on building a diverse pipeline for careers in tech and cyber. Capital One has given me the opportunity to work with great organizations like CodePath and Per Scholas, as well as mentor local middle schoolers.

David Leigh, Sr Manager, Cyber Technical

I am thankful for being part of the Capital One team! It's not just one thing, Capital One's commitment to its values, its customers, its associate safety and welfare, its technology innovation - especially in cloud adoption and leading cloud governance.

Kelly Brown, Lead Software Engineer

I'm thankful for DynamoDB Global tables and no longer worrying about regional database failovers. 

Claire Allred, Manager, Data Science

I am thankful for Capital One’s continued commitment to associate development as manifested by “sending” associates to virtual conferences. As a mother in tech, this has given me greater opportunities to attend tech conferences as there is no travel (and the resulting additional child care arrangements) required.

Arunkumar Ganesan, Distinguished Engineer

I feel awesome when the computers work together as a team using distributed computing technologies. It tackles problems like scalability, performance, resiliency, single point of failures and more. I am forever grateful that I get to build and deploy software applications using the distributed cache, database, and file storage system in my time at Capital One.

Bobby Mundy, Master Software Engineer

I am thankful for Capital One’s Invest in Yourself Days that allowed me to study and obtain three AWS certifications. This has helped me bring managed AWS cloud solutions for business intent to my team.

What are YOU thankful for? Tweet @CapitalOneTech and have a happy Thanksgiving! 🦃