About Me

Who Am I?

Hi, I’m Coty! I am a father of three boys (all under three years old), a member of the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe of North Carolina, and an Associate Software Engineering Manager currently employed by Red Hat, Inc. Since I’m still new to being a People Manager I have continued to be very active in my previous individual contributor (IC) role as Senior Software Engineer while I’m transitioning into the new role.

Volunteering my time and skills to American Indian tribes and nonprofit organizations are a couple of my passions. I sit on two different American Indian organization boards; I serve as the Vice President of the Triangle Native American Society (TNAS) and I serve as the Secretary of Natives in Tech. I also volunteer my time and skills to my tribe and TNAS as Webmaster, Facebook business page admin, and G Suite admin (mostly focused on managing gmail accounts).

My partner and I live in central North Carolina along with our three sons and several pets.

What Do I Do For Work?

As an engineer, the main project that I contribute to is Apache Tomcat where I’m a committer and member of the Project Management Committee (PMC) and Security Team. I maintain the Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Tomcat packages as well. I also contribute to Apache HTTP Server (httpd) and OpenSSL, but not as often. If you’re interested in seeing more about my software engineering work, check out my Projects page!

In my role as a People Manager I support a team of engineers that work on a productized version of Apache Tomcat, which includes several different libraries and components.

Last but not least, I serve as the Chairperson of the Native + Indigenous Diversity and Inclusion Community at work (D+I Communities are our version of Employee Resource Groups). I was a co-founder of the group back in 2018 and working with the leadership team of the community is one of the reasons why I was interested in trying out a People Manager role.

What Do I Do When I’m Not Working?

Usually when I’m not working I’m entertaining the kids, but sometimes (when they’re all in bed or napping) I find myself with a bit of free time. Most recently I learned to use Hugo and developed this site :) I enjoy making things with my hands so I try and fit in some woodworking when I can, which is usually in support of my partner’s business, Simply Sutherland Studios.