Resume

Objective

I am looking for an environment where I can utilize my skills and creativity to impact change. I enjoy the problem solving involved in engineering highly available and scalable Linux-based systems and tuning those systems for performance.

Presentations

Prolific speaker who shares experiences and builds community around the world.

Employment

2014 - Present - Transforia, Inc. - San Jose, CA

CTO and Co-founder

Delivering an open source, managed and secure laptop leasing solution. We lower IT costs through a leasing model akin to a cell phone contract, using Linux on the desktop, and embracing cloud storage that is totally managed and secured.

2014 - Present - FOSSETCON - Orlando, FL

Managing Partner

FOSSETCON is Free and Open Source Software Expo and Technology Conference

Co-organizing our first conference September 11th - 13th in Orlando, FL.

2013 - Present - GH Solutions, LLC - Indianapolis, IN

Managing Partner

• Helping companies implement DevOps practices including automating systems with configuration management, continuous integration, and agile project management.

• Providing Introduction to Puppet training.

• Providing training on advanced Puppet topics.

2013 - Present - Ericsson AB - Stockholm, SE

Puppet Architect

Enabling autonomous R&D hubs around the world to leverage Puppet and effectively work together developing Puppet code. Provide mentoring to various teams, establish levels of quality, and create a software development life cycle.

• Conducted hands on training at remote R&D sites in Sweden, China, Canada, Germany, and the US where colleagues learned how to use Puppet and contribute to projects on GitHub.com.

• Review code and give feedback and mentoring which is resulting in skill levels rising for the entire team.

• Transitioning location based teams from forking code and not sharing to working together at the global level and contributing to open source projects.

• Implemented Agile/Scrum which has led to more transparency, higher velocity in delivering, and less context switching.

2013 - 2013 - Herff Jones - Indianapolis, IN

Automation Consultant

Implemented Puppet architecture and developed modules primarily around managing JBoss instances. Effectively taught Puppet development through hands-on work on actual problems with a focus on good design patterns which resulted in a data driven infrastructure.

2010 - 2013 - Puppet Labs - Portland, OR

Professional Services Engineer

Puppet Labs is the company behind the pervasive configuration management software, Puppet.

• Evangelizing Puppet and building community by speaking at conferences and meetups around the world.
• Solving problems with Puppet for companies of all sizes and industries.
• Quickly automating infrastructures.
• Consulting on DevOps practices, agile methodology, and streamlining processes for efficiency.
• Creating training materials and teaching classes globally.
• Acted as Subject Matter Expert while developing Puppet Certification.
• Sharing my knowledge and experiences of systems administration and best practices outside of Puppet with others.
• Assisting our Sales team and international partners with pre-sales on site with clients.
• Highly adaptable to different cultures and new situations. Given a clear objective, I bring results.
• As a remote employee and one who travels at least 80% of the time, I have a track record of excelling with little to no guidance.

2009 - 2010 - Dashwire, Inc. (Acquired by HTC August 2011) - Seattle, WA

Systems Architect

During my tenure at Dashwire they focused on providing mobile synchronization technology for BestBuy and Clearwire. Now their technology is leveraged by carriers to customize phones and retain customers.

• Authored security policy
• Responsible for technology budget
• Implemented configuration management with Puppet
• Extensively tuned MySQL to meet the growing demands of our users.
• Re-architecting infrastructure to ensure maximum uptime and scalability to match business needs
• Adopted an agile methodology to handling work
• Created a development work flow for working on feature requests/bugs that moved the company away from Google spreadsheets for tracking bugs to using a customized RT instance. This system was used by anyone submitting changes, development, and QA.
• Deployed a system to manage customer support interactions using RT and RTFM and taught customer support how to use, customize, and ultimately own and admin the system themselves. Integrated with website so information about the user, such as their phone type and provider could be passed without customer intervention. This information was crucial in understanding problem areas and gathering metrics which drove development focus.

2008 - 2010 - ISEN.org - Indianapolis, IN

President

ISEN is a non profit centered around the cataloging of databases and deep web searching.

• Transitioning company from profit to non profit 501(c)3.
• Changed philosophy and practice from pursuing patents to embracing open source.
• Creating the ISEN standard.

2007 - 2009 - Speakeasy, Inc. (A BestBuy company) - Seattle, WA

Senior Systems Engineer

Architecting large-scale, high availability, high transaction volume Linux-based systems in our telecommunications and ISP environments.

• Participated in design, implementation, and build out of Speakeasy's new residential VoIP platform.
• Standardized company on RedHat and Solaris to minimize the number of supported operating systems.
• Introduced Configuration Management with Puppet and automated system builds with Cobbler which provided the first truly reproducible systems within Speakeasy.
• Redesigned DNS architecture to move our network off of using routable IP space and into using RFC1918 private IP space.
• Architected a perimeter mail system to block spam and check for viruses using greylisting for over 4 million mails a day which alleviated a great load off of our existing and decaying mail service without modifying it.
• Assisted with data center buildout in Washington, DC for Speakeasy Voice where I oversaw and participated in the physical buildout of the structured cabling, network, and all hardware as well as the configuration of those systems.
• Introduced Runbooks to allow for smooth handoffs between Engineering and Operations.
• Fulfilling the role of a Release Engineer in respects to our Puppet code. Responsible for QA, code merges, releases and all of the associated change management processes.
• Worked within a small team to adopt agile methodologies being used by one development group to our engineering groups.

2004 - 2007 - Mixxer, Inc - Seattle, WA

Systems Engineer II

Responsible for production, development, and testing environments with an emphasis on high availability, scalability, and performance. Performance tuning of the Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) stack was done at the hardware, network, and application levels.

• Created a comprehensive backup solution comprised of multiple levels of spinning disk storage and offline tape storage using custom shell scripts and Veritas NetBackup. This architecture saved considerable amounts of money by minimizing the amount of Veritas licenses and expensive disks needed.

• Implemented caching at multiple levels of the LAMP stack using technologies such as CDN, TurckMMCache, AdoDB, and memcache which allowed us to serve more content with less hardware and provide additional redundancy.
• Built a geo-distributed mobile messaging system used to deliver content to handsets accomplished by reverse engineering carriers' mail filters, Postfix, and C that was instrumental to the company's ability to service Verizon and AT&T which accounted for a large percentage of our customers.

2004 - 2006 - 3GUpload.com (acquired by Mixxer) - Indianapolis, IN

Systems Engineer

Oversaw the migration of a small infrastructure to a high availability and scalable enterprise-level architecture. Created and managed development, testing, and production environments. My duties also entailed office IT including license management, internal file servers, and servicing large-scale printers and vinyl cutters in our manufacturing area.

• Managed a smooth transition between data centers with significant infrastructure changes
• Converted an antiquated sendmail system to a HA Postfix based system using MySQL, GFS, IMAPS and a web based interface for administration that was used to distribute content to handsets along with corporate mail
• Designed an infrastructure with no single points of failure to ensure maximum uptime and scalability to match business needs
• Implemented Nagios and other open source tools to effectively monitor our infrastructure, our code base, and the SLA's of vendors. This often meant developing and hacking code in C, Python, Perl and PHP.
• Brought the office into full license compliance and championed Open Source software in our organization with tools such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, and SuSE Linux

2003 Cummins Engines - Columbus, IN

Unix Systems Administrator

Participated on a small team responsible for supporting approximately 250 machines worldwide for Cummins and their distributors. Administered and secured many versions of Solaris, AIX, Tru64, and HP-UX on a wide array of hardware.

• Implemented SSH, along with the means to gather entropy, across the network in order to replace unprotected protocols such as telnet and rsh
• Transitioned network and policies to utilize user separation in accordance with best practices utilizing sudo
• Administered Veritas File systems connected via fibre to different SAN's

2002 - 2003 - WebExcellence - Indianapolis, IN

Systems Administrator

Maintained Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Win2k servers in a web hosting and colocation environment with an emphasis on uptime. Daily tasks involved configuring web sites using Apache, IIS, Microsoft SQL 2000 and MySQL. Created automation tools and managed DNS.

• Implemented free open source solutions including a wiki for internal documentation, RT for ticket requests tracking, and Nagios for monitoring
• Built tools for the automation of DNS, email, and web hosting
• Hardened systems against attack and verified with penetration tests
• Worked with developers on fixing SQL query injection vulnerabilities

2002 - InfoTex - Kokomo, IN

Unix Engineer

Served as a Unix Engineer on various projects including the installation of FreeBSD based VPN's at client sites and translating technical information for company assessment in the financial and health sectors.

• Prepared custom IT solutions, tailored to individual clients' needs
• Created custom data backup and retrieval strategies

2001 - 2002 - New Beginnings and Adventures - Indianapolis, IN

System Administrator

Maintained office workstations, printers, and a lab of approximately 20 machines and one OpenBSD server at an inner-city youth center.

• Redesigned the network in a secure fashion employing OpenBSD as a firewall
• Taught children about computers and the Internet

2000 - 2001 Earth and Atmospheric Sciences of Purdue University - West Lafayette, IN

Jr. Systems Administrator

Maintained a highly heterogeneous (roughly 10 operating systems) network of 350 computers including two labs, one with FreeBSD and the other with MacOS workstations. Researched software choices and wrote end user documentation.

• Created cross-platform data access which allowed your information to follow you between OS's for Unix, Windows, and MacOS using NFS, automount, Samba, and Netatalk
• Programmed an inventory database in C that utilized our network management tools
• Performed security audits of departmental servers
• Deployed imaging software to push operating systems and individual software packages across the network

Training

• F5 - BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) - Essentials - v9.x - 2008
• F5 - BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) - Advanced Topics - v9.x - 2008
• F5 - BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) - v9.x - 2008
• RHCT - RedHat Certified Technician received 05/04 on RHEL3
• VMWare - Week long course covering all aspects of VMWare including sizing and administration
• Agile - 3 day bootcamp on using Scrum and Agile methodologies within an Engineering environment from ASPE Technology

Keywords

• Operating Systems: Linux (RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian), BSD (Free, Open, Net), Solaris, MacOS X

• Programming: Bash Shell Scripting, PHP, C, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, HTML, SVN, Git

• Configuring and tuning Apache, PHP, MySQL, SSH, IMAP, POP3, Request Tracker, Postfix, Samba, RAID, DNS / BIND, DHCP, NAT, Tomcat, Passenger, Squid, Lighttpd, Perl, memcache, conserver, Puppet, Cobbler, VMWare

• System Architectures: x86, Sparc, Sun Blade 6000 chassis, NetApp Filers
• Networking Hardware: F5 LTM, F5 GTM, Foundry load balancers and switches, Perle and Cyclades serial consoles

• Monitoring and Trending with Nagios, Zenoss, NetVigil, PerfParse, MRTG, Cacti, and Big Brother

• Holistic Security from policy creation and enforcement to penetration tests, including PCI and SOX compliance

• Design and implementation of fault tolerant networks

• Creating and implementing backup and disaster recovery strategies