To be part of a company that shares my values of honesty, responsibility, quality and teamwork

Permalink Splunk.com (5+ years)

Principle Site Reliability Engineer (03/2018, current)

  • Advocate for the customer by speaking up during decision making and prioritization discussions
  • Evangelize for dashboards, metrics, local development, and team over individual
  • Designed and deployed Kubernetes observability with ability to tolerate AZ failures and notify of regional failures
  • Co-lead development of an interview process which allowed candidates to troubleshoot a real live working system and consistently received positive feedback from both candidates and staff
  • Created chaos testing code and techniques to accelerate ability to understand specific software and system behavior
  • Championed the use of chaos theory to learn more about system behavior and aid in data driven decisions
  • Developed Alertmanager notification receiver to enhance alert consistency and usability
  • Learned how to use Kubernetes (the good, the bad and the ugly)
  • Spent more time writing and talking, less time coding 🤔

Permalink Climate.com (7 years)

Staff Engineer (06/2011, 03/2018)

  • Led the design and implementation of a highly available monitoring solution based on Prometheus, Grafana, AWS, cAdvisor, PagerDuty and various custom exporters (Current metric volume is around 160k samples per second)
  • Initiated the use of microservices for managing infrastructure using Golang, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, REST, Swagger, and authentication via LDAP middleware
  • Created tools in Golang to make working with other tools easier (Splunk, Jira, short links, etc)
  • Participated in hackathons (Git code search and distributed Slack bot using Gearman)
  • Successfully migrated the company from Gerrit to Bitbucket Server
  • Developed internal tools to expose things like weather data to staff while on the platform team
  • Worked on UI technologies just long enough to realize I’m better at command line interfaces :)

Permalink Reardencommerce.com (3 years)

Engineering Manager, Tools (05/2008 - 06/2011)

  • Led the Engineering tools team responsible for scm, performance, automation, and other assorted tools
  • Helped form a well-rounded team recognized for innovation, collaboration, openness, and speed of iteration
  • Authored documentation which usually resulted in people asking “Is that an open source project?” (credit goes to Sphinx)
  • Created a cluster of over 100 machines requiring zero manual intervention to maintain health
  • Wrote python code to integrate things like ldap, yammer.com, Jira, smtp, irc, and git into web based applications
  • Mentored people on various technical topics, always trying to produce good documentation for reference later
  • Demonstrated unconventional interview techniques which proved to be effective enough to fill my calendar every week :)
  • Prototyped things like couchdb, eucalyptus, git, node.js, python, sphinx, ubuntu (some later became standard)

Permalink Nettrekker.com (1.3 years)

Senior Application Developer (01/2007 - 05/2008)

  • Developed custom MVC framework designed to work with Memcached, MySQL hash tables, Selenium, and Cheetah templates
  • Developed web service using Python, PostgreSQL, and JSON to enable the social networking features of nettrekker.com
  • Built virtualization lab currently used for researching and testing Hadoop and Lucene
  • Created database schema responsible for implementing business logic using PL/pgSQL functions, triggers, and foreign key constraints
  • Performed role as release engineer responsible for maintaining all version control branches
  • Implemented backup and recovery process allowing restoration of a PostgreSQL database to a specified date and time
  • Developed realtime searchable index of IRC chat for documenting internal communications
  • Designed inventory system using Python, Bash, Awk and Sed that monitored server health and software patch levels using a plugin architecture

Permalink Cincinnatichildrens.org (1.3 years)

Systems Analyst, Application Development (09/2005 - 01/2007)

  • Developed searchable documentation with Subversion integration using JavaScript, Python, XML, and XSL
  • Mentored development team on version control, JSON, and adherence to W3C standards
  • Trained new employees to use the existing implementation of the dispatcher pattern-based framework
  • Deployed Nagios with a PostgreSQL backend to monitor web applications and web services

Permalink Cincinnatichildrens.org (1.4 years)

Systems Analyst: Ancillary Systems (04/2004 - 09/2005)

  • Developed Windows service written in Python that alerted staff to GE CPM downtime
  • Created documentation using XML and XSL that carried a reputation as being the best in the IS department
  • Wrote Python software to automate and streamline the scheduling process
  • Worked as the project management liaison between the hospital and software vendors to resolve major issues and manage upgrades

Permalink Clippard.com (3 years)

System Administrator & Web Developer (04/2001 - 04/2004)

  • Deployed and maintained FreeBSD and Linux email, firewall, and web servers
  • Coordinated the implementation of a private network between two separate locations using FreeBSD and Cisco routing
  • Created e-commerce website with dynamic product configuration using AJAX
  • Virtually eliminated spam and viruses by building a custom email server
  • Developed a centralized password management system across multiple applications and platforms

Permalink Rockfloat.com

Objective: Personal Playground (2000 - Current)

  • Replaced everything with ACM, CloudFront, Hugo, Route53, and S3
  • Collaborated with photagious.com to implement an infrastructure upgrade using PHP opcode caching, MySQL replication, Hardened Gentoo, Linux, and load balancing using the Linux High Availability Project
  • Implemented performance enhancements on rockfloat.com achieving an “A” score using YSlow
  • Developed personal finance application incorporating many web 2.0 technologies including AJAX, Jquery, and chart generation using the Google chart API
  • Created Python web framework named Chula, released under the GPL
  • Implemented session and content caching with Memcached, dramatically reducing database requests
  • Developed application that parses Atom and RSS feeds to generate static HTML
  • Developed extensive documentation on assorted open source technologies referenced in part by gentoo-wiki.com

Permalink Contributions to open source projects

(Mostly little bug fixes)

  1. https://github.com/coreos/docs
  2. https://github.com/giovtorres/kvm-install-vm
  3. https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo
  4. https://github.com/grafana/grafana
  5. https://github.com/jmcfarlane/notable
  6. https://github.com/jtblin/go-ldap-client
  7. https://github.com/linsomniac/python-memcached
  8. https://github.com/lxc/lxc
  9. https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway
  10. https://github.com/pypa/wheel
  11. https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen

Permalink Skills

Permalink Use Daily

  • Git, Gitlab
  • Linux
  • Nvim, Zsh
  • Slack, Zoom
  • Sway

Permalink Use Frequently

  • AWS
  • Containers (Podman, Docker)
  • Github
  • Golang
  • Yaml, Markdown, JSON
  • Kubernetes, Minikube
  • Libvirt, Kvm
  • Prometheus
  • Python
  • Whiteboard

Permalink Use Periodically

  • Admin tools (tcpdump, strace, chroot, configs, etc)
  • Grafana
  • HTML/CSS/JavaScript (bootstrap, jquery, backbone)
  • Hugo
  • Terraform
  • Threading

Permalink Use Once in a While

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Loki, Promtail, Tempo

Permalink Education

Attended college (University of Cincinnati, Xavier University, Cincinnati State, Christ Hospital School of Nursing) for 5 years while spending nights and weekends hacking away toward my current career. I also spent 5 years working in a hospital and one year working as a registered nurse. Makes for good stories :)