* RESUME *
RELEASE 7.1LTS - 14 JULY 2021
$HOME/.profile
Versatile software professional with a 25-year work history including both
technical and management positions. I've a fondness for teams building
purposeful systems that enrich people's lives and I'm interested in companies
that strive to be inclusive, respect the individual, value creativity and
spontaneity, and know how to be grown-up without being stuffy and boring.
.COM
2017-∞
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Mailchimp, Atlanta, Georgia
- Baremetal Linux
- Kubernetes
- GCP
- AWS
- Akamai
- Golang
- Python
- PHP
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Elastic Search / ELK
- GitHub Enterprise
- Jenkins
- Bugsnag
- Puppet
- Terraform
- Jira
- Confluence
As an SRE for an all-in-one marketing company, I am centered on deployment and
CI tooling and providing support to multichannel and websites product teams.
Embedded in the Websites domain, I am responsible for the operational and
reliability aspects of our product, and my duties include maintaining
continuity of our operations thru documentation, observability, alerting and
implementing SLIs and SLOs. I actively support inclusiveness and mentorship
across Engineering, and I work as a liaison between our dev and ops teams and
advocate for design, QA, support, and user research teams in technical
contexts.
-
Working with developers and other SREs to forge our Domain's path forward from
our well-established on-prem monolith architecture to our future rooted in GCP
using Cloud Run and GKE.
-
Established standard criteria for operational readiness of our products in a
"listen hard, change fast" company and evaluated Websites product offerings
against that criteria. Engaged our development teams to iteratively close gaps
and instill a domain-wide culture of observability and reliability.
-
Developed, pitched and delivered on call program with incident response to the
Websites product domain to bring increased autonomy to around 30 FTE across 4
engineering teams and our management.
-
Developed new hire onboarding program for SREs to introduce key concepts, our
tooling and processes using a supportive and non-linear approach.
-
Reduced incident response time by updating our deployment pipeline to lift up
changes to Websites code from the 100s of deployments daily and surface them in
our Grafana dashboards.
-
Worked with support leads, tech writers and engineers to program and present at
internal conference to promote comprehensive, creative and inclusive use of
Confluence across the company.
2014-2017
Senior Systems Architect
Rentpath, Atlanta, Georgia
- VMWare ESXi
- RedHat Linux 5/6
- AWS
- CDNetworks
- Ruby
- Python
- Graphite
- Statsd
- Splunk
- Gitlab
- Percona
- PostgreSQL
- Puppet
- The Foreman
- Saltstack
- Jekyll
As lead systems architect for the team of 8 Linux engineers at a rental
property advertising company, I was responsible for 24x7x365 operations and
deployments to fully-virtualized multi-datacenter HA environment of 2000+
servers. I also mentored team members and interviewed new ones and invested
significantly in our product development teams to improve and streamline
operations and deployments.
- De-risked everyday changes that caused unplanned outages thru active
listening, simplifying, and injecting peer-review into our processes to build
confidence in our work and each other. As an example, human error in DNS
produced 3 production outages in one week, causing management to demand
approval for every change and that changes be performed overnight. I radically
simplified tooling, routed changes through version control, added peer review
and automation, then invested in our team. At the end, our team was able to
execute fully-automated, zero-impact, business hours changes to DNS at-will and
with confidence.
- Supercharged our puppet infrastructure to make our platform fully turnkey.
Using The Foreman, mCollective, and VMWare's APIs, we were able to consistently
provision, install, and deploy hosts into production rotation on-demand within
10 minutes.
- Led the team through a significant in-flight upgrade of 2 data centers,
approximately 2000 hosts, from RedHat 6x to 7x with no customer impact and
minimal impact to developer velocity.
2014-2016
Senior Consultant
Network Utility Force, Atlanta, Georgia
- RedHat Linux 5/6
- Python
- Django
- Github
- MySQL
- Puppet
- Chef
- GNU Mailman
- OpenLDAP
Leader of automation, management, and software development with a highly
regarded and experienced team of network, wireless, and security architects.
Clients included service providers, media companies, small and large
enterprises, and higher education institutions.
-
Worked with leading national carrier client to update their Chef tooling in
their production and development environments.
-
Built and refreshed environment for an international networking conference
client. Using new software and systems I developed, a team of two people were
able to manage the logistics of their non-profit organization, including
collecting membership dues, member communications, elections, and benefits, and
the programming and holding quarterly conferences around the United States.
2011-∞
Owner and Principal
Venture Cranial, Atlanta, Georgia
- Ubuntu Linux
- Google Cloud Platform
- Amazon Web Services
- Python
- Objective C
- Swift
- Vue.js
- BackboneJS
- Ionic
- Django
- Github
- Github Actions
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
I learned from my work at MindSpring how immeasurably helpful an engineer who
can see the big picture can be to an early-stage business. A little elbow
grease and some ingenuity can go a long way to solve meaningful problems that
stand in the way of success. After being asked by friends and coworkers to
help, I formed my own small business dedicated to helping people navigate early
technology challenges and develop prototype products.
- The networking conference client transitioned to my business for 3rd and
subsequent phases as we integrated with 3rd party products for scheduling,
voting, and payments and added additional features for mobile, calendaring and
conference steering.
- Developed mobile language learning game assisting children with learning
or language challenges. Using the early prototype, the client applied for and
received a Federal grant to deploy a pilot program using iPads at a DC school
system, They received valuable feedback which guided refinement work such as
integrating early beacon technology into Ionic to enabled automatic context
switching based on location (e.g. "math class" vs "art class" vs "lunch").
Finally, I proudly "graduated the company" by helping to interview and
successfully transition my work to their first full-time engineer.
- Inspired by nostalgia, I brought the charm and delight of my parents'
1970s Lumitime C-33 alarm clock into the new millennium. I designed, wrote and
published an iPhone version of the iconic clock, offering additional animations
and color choices over the original. (illumitime.com)
2012-2014
Principal Engineer
WiserTogether, Washington, D.C (100% Remote)
- Hosted RedHat Linux 5/6
- Windows 2000 Server
- OpenShift
- Python
- Django
- Backbone
- Github
- Gerrit
- Jenkins
- MySQL
- Solr
- Elastic Search
- Datastax
- Active Directory
- Splunk
- Puppet
As a principal engineer at a DC health startup, I worked for the CTO in support
of the data scientist and VP of Product as a full-stack developer. As a
healthcare information application sold to large companies (e.g. GE, Corning,
Walgreens) to offer as part of their benefits packages, the product combined
data from insurance companies, health surveys, and user profiles to offer
recommendations and guidance around complex health topics such as pregnancies,
heart, lung and endocrine issues, and drug efficacy.
- Worked closely with CTO, data scientist, and Director of Technology to align
and develop the technology, processes, and security operating at the heart of
the company. Evaluated hosting vendors for suitability for support, scale, and
HIPAA-compliance.
- Responsible for crafting and surfacing the technology stack focused on
combining multi-variate survey data covering conditions, treatments, and
outcomes with personal health data, experience, costs and risk profiles and
provide that data in a consistent and performant way via contracted APIs.
- Supported Sales team to provide evidence of HIPAA-compliance and auditing
results and worked with clients to establish and provide necessary training
around proper handling, transfer and ingestion of employee health data.
- Assumed responsibility for deployments and general operations to allow
developers to focus more on product development and less on operations and
escalations from the business. Interviewed and trained QA engineer to serve as
as secondary operations engineer.
- Organized fulfillment and provisioning of employee tech (computers, displays,
VoIP phone, AAA) and hired full-time employee to assume daily responsibilities.
1996-2012
Head Geek
MindSpring, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia
Director, Internal Applications
MindSpring, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia
Staff Software Engineer
MindSpring, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia
- RedHat Linux
- Solaris
- Network Appliance
- PHP
- Python
- C / C++
- Java
- Apache / Apache Tomcat
- Netcool Omnibus
- Nervecenter
- SNMP
- MySQL
- Oracle RAQ
- OpenLDAP
- Netscape Directory Server
- ADP HRizon
- Homemade bread and jam
- Knockoff Doubletree Cookies
16-year career with national internet service provider based in Atlanta
spanning highly dynamic periods of business growth and decline. I worked
regularly with local, remote, and outsourced personnel building broad technical
and management experience walking systems from concept » development »
production » KTLO » decommission or outsourcing.
- Hired to support the NOC, my role expanded in scope and responsibility over
time to Team Lead to Manager to Director with budget responsibility for 25-FTE
department of 4 teams across 2 cities building and running systems and
applications saving our business millions of dollars and countless person
hours.
- Our issue tracker tracked work across all of Engineering, the network and
service monitoring saved $1M-$2M in yearly vendor licensing, our capacity
planning usually kept us ahead of growth, DNS management made our constant
network expansions safer and faster, and passive infrastructure backup tooling
prevented 2 nationwide "hard reset tours". We also ran the corporate intranet,
deployed a corporate collaborative suite with custom company directory and
provisioning, implemented two time management solutions and ran the HRIS and
payroll system.
- I changed from Director of Internal Application Development to Staff Engineer
on product teams supporting customer-facing products in 2004. Created log
indexing system serving 5000 support agents around the world with interactive
searches of 100s of millions of logs per day, managed web hosting
infrastructure and control panel for tens of thousands of hosting customers,
web mail portal in daily use by millions of customers, and integrated voice
services from acquired telco.
- Many of the systems I built and maintained, including my very first which
managed our IP space and DNS, remained in production until the mid-2010s, with
some still in production to this day.
1995-1996
Principal Technologist
Net America LLC, Bowling Green, Kentucky
Reported to partners of regional ISP startup in Bowling Green and Owensboro.
Company acquired by MindSpring in 1996.
-
Managed DEC Alpha OSF/1 servers and modem backplanes for two POPs,
including all hosted applications (pop3, smtp, usenet, kerberos, and http),
served as highest level of escalation for support agents, wrote Macintosh
dialer client for platform.
-
When the company was sold, I became the first employee selected to
transition to MindSpring as part of an acquisition.
1993-1995
VAX Operator and Webmaster
Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky
University system VAX Operator, Microcomputer Support Specialist and first
campus Webmaster.
-
Operator for multi-node VAX/VMS cluster as the University rolled out 100
megabit fibre across campus to dorms, faculty offices, and student centers.
-
Wrote many kernel-privileged applications for managing services and print
queues, supported faculty and staff as they each received a first PC/Mac.
Hosted first wku.edu web server on Slackware Linux on my desktop PC, collected
and built clickable campus adventure tour and maintained mac.archive mirror.
.EDU
Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.
BS in Computer Science, 1990
SAIR Linux GNU Certification (#563871)
Linux Certified Administrator, 2001
Linux Certified Professional, 2001
Council for Service Management Education (#54044)
Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management (ITIL, itSMF), 2004
.ORG
Apple Developer Program
International Association of Privacy
Professionals Python Software Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Association for Computing Machinery
Greater Athens Area Software Developers
National Brittany Rescue and Adoption Network
/etc
References are available upon request.
I enjoy 70s funk, soul, and disco 45s — an analog, pre-iPod method of music
playback in which pressed nylon discs are physically spun under a needle at 45
revolutions per minute. The vibrating needle produces a signal which, when
amplified, creates a smooth, mellow groove. I also enjoy playing the keyboard
and making my Theremin wail.
I live, work, and zoom (!!) with many Brittanys — an old tiny huntress, one
obsessed with bugs and reflections, and a grumpy one who chews up every
cardboard box we don't immediately recycle. My dogs, wife, and I evaluate,
foster, and rehabilitate Brittanys rescued by the National Brittany Rescue and
Adoption Network so that they can be placed in a permanent, loving family home.