About Me
I am an ops generalist with over 20 years of industry experience, ranging from small environments with a handful of servers to large scale systems involving thousands of servers. For most of my career, I’ve been a member of front-line operations teams, dealing with production deployments, automation, and outages.
For the last five years, I’ve spent my days developing Go based server applications and client tooling for systems automation and asset management. I am most at home in backend systems and I find joy in bringing old code bases up to modern standards, making them sustainable and stable.
I also have significant experience with software/systems architecture and design, including gathering stakeholder requirements, writing requirements documents, and carrying them through implementation and production deployment.
In any job, I am looking for the usual challenging work and good diverse people to work with. For most of the last 15 years, I have worked in a remote capacity and am interested in working remotely with a highly communicative team that is willing to use text chat and video conferencing.
I am only interested in remote-only positions.
I am not interested in management roles.
Recent Employment History
DigitalOcean, LLC (Oct 2019 - Feb 2023)
- Senior Infrastructure Engineer I - 2019-2021
- Senior Engineer II - 2021-2023
Server application development, with command line tooling, in Go and MySQL, deployed to Kubernetes-like system
Telemetry-gathering agent, deployed on every server, in Go
- Standard Linux CLI tooling
- SMBIOS
- Redfish
Globally deployed Redfish polling / collection service
Globally deployed highly-available data transit backplane with Go and gRPC
Project lead with requirements gathering, stakeholder management, software/systems architecture and design
Joyent, Inc (Oct 2017 - Sep 2019)
Validating datacenter builds with Perl and Go
- Conch
- JSON API server written in Perl, backed by PostgreSQL
- Conch Shell
- Command line application, written in Go, for accessing and automating Conch API actions
- General Systems Administration
- Ansible
- Docker, including Docker Swarm
- PostgreSQL server administration
- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
- Primary Technologies
- Go
- Perl
- PostgreSQL
Neustar Inc (Jul 2017 - Oct 2017)
Time Warner Cable (Mar 2010 - May 2017)
Software engineering, architecture, and design for systems automation and monitoring for video-on-demand backend systems, including requirements gathering, detailed design specifications, and stakeholder communication.
Extensive on-call responsibilities, including incident management and authorship of post-mortem analyses.
Architecture / Engineering
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Architected and led the implementation of IP-based live video distribution for the TWCTV iPad app, versions 1 and 2. The application was subsequently awarded an Emmy Engineering Certificate.
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Architected and implemented automation for video-on-demand content intake, transcoding, and distribution. This self-healing system handled over a thousand TV shows, movies, and advertisements daily with little to no human intervention
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Architected and implemented automation for content metadata (title, description, ratings, artwork, etc) improvement
Software Development
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Workflow and systems automation using Ruby
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Monitoring and data management UIs (including real-time interfaces with WebSockets) using Ruby, Javascript, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL
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Monitoring UIs in Splunk
Previous Employers
- YouPorn / Midstream Media - May 2009 - Feb 2010
- Singlesnet, Inc / The Hive - Dec 2007 - Mar 2009
- America Online - Feb 2003 - Oct 2007
- Databuilt, Inc - Dec 2001 - Feb 2003
- The Creative Group - May 2000 - Dec 2001
Education
- Bachelor’s Degree - 1996 - 2000