I put this together as a personal accomplishments page to better keep track of things I’ve accomplished in a more summarized way.
It’s really easy to lose track of stuff like this, so I’ll try to keep this updated with major wins here. Initially, it’s just kinda a LinkedIn professional profile equivalent, but I’m going to try keep track of some “levelups” and wins here as time goes by.
Thanks for stopping by!
Page Metrics
Check out these google analytic metrics if you want to see a pretty chart.
What Makes Me Worth Considering?
I’m someone who believes in “cradle to grave” ownership. With a strong background in cloud operations, I look at software development from the deployment and operations side heavily, and this impacts the design and development approach. I’m also pretty darn good at automating & offloading work to computers so that my work can scale and be reused over on many projects.
I’m a consumate tweaker, so being part of a team that embraces experimentation and pushing for improvement while delivering value is a good fit.
Someone might look at deploying a webservice and spin up an EC2 linux webserver and call it done.
What would go through my head:
- Can I host this using a managed service such as ECS Fargate to avoid the operational toil of managing my own instance?
- Can I benefit from a service like this with autoscaling to ensure a failed task can automatically recover or allocate work to a new node?
- Did the web service add the instrumentation libraries for opentracing or the appropriate library?
- Are structured logs being used to ensure automatic parsing by the logging provider?
- Is the service being deployed via a CICD provider instead of manually?
- Are unit tests being run on developer machines with hooks and also by CI system?
- Are integration tests being run prior to deployment?
- Are service level objectives defined and tracked if required to ensure service isn’t over-engineered, but also allocated appropriate time for new work if problems occur that would impact customer satisfaction?
- Is the core infrastructure defined via code?
- Is the application configured to pull its configuration from environment variables or cloud configuration provider rather than requiring manual changes?
Skill Highlight
Lots of Experience
Exposure & Fundamentals
Things I'd Love to Work More On
PowerShell (CrossPlatform), .NET Framework
SQL (Dev, Design & Operations)
Infrastructure As Code
GitHub/Actions/CI/Azure Pipelines
Technical Docs
DevOps
Observability
Containerization
Windows
Linux
C#/.NET
Serverless
Python
Serverless
Serverless
Microservices
Developer Tooling
Containerization
Professional Profile
March 2021 - Current Thycotic Senior Software Engineer (AWS/Go)
⚡ Improved SLDC applying DevOps practices towards trunk based
development and infra-as-code.
⚡ Supported PR Reviews and oversight of code from offshore team programming primarily in Go.
⚡ Go: added structured logging, APM integration to support observability
⚡ AWS Architecture redesign for ECS Fargate container driven support
of Go services, as well as supporting Docker configuration.
⚡ Go & Task tooling to support developer workflow improvements for
pre-commit, building, and other tooling.
⚡ Investigative work for Kubernetes and usage of microservices using Dapr.
Things I Used
Go, AWS, Terraform, Terragrunt, Bash, Kubernetes, Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) for Microservices.
Public Artifacts
Work under NDA. Public related blog posts on general technology topics where posted on blog as well as some general studies on applying Go with TDD and algorithm studies are listed here.
Magetools
100DaysOfCode for Go
Learn Go With Tests - Applied
2014 - 2021 Altus Group Senior Developer (Database & Dev Operations)
Some Highlights
Senior Individual Contributor with cross-team impact functioning as Database/Site Reliability Engineer
Started with focus on SQL Server development, architecture, and performance tuning. Migrated to Development operations team during tenure and operated on development through operations. Heavy focus on production reliability for data tier. Additional focus on automation for non-release tasks, such as Terraform deployments, AWS SSM management, automated runbook creation and more. Functioned in part as Site Reliability Engineer with mixed cross-functional impact.
⚡ Part of transformation of on-premise to Cloud based
product
⚡ Designed AWS Lambda serverless solution for providing KPI insight
⚡ Improved velocity of infrastructure deployments by using Terraform
Cloud, deployed a PaaS based AWS RDS product.
⚡ Built very detailed runbook and documentation library supporting detailed insight on databases, team processes, incident response, and more. Inspired by GitLab’s concept of “handbook first”, I promoted collaborative codification of knowledge among my team
⚡ Designed and built the primary systems management and configuration used to rapidly bootstrap hundreds of instances and allow quickly pushing updates out.
solutions.
⚡ Built robust AMI pipelines combining Azure Pipelines & Packer, including automated tests, matrix builds, and detailed documentation.
⚡ Promoted stronger code based pull request driven workflows with
“Gitops” focus, code reviews, and mentoring of other junior team
members.
⚡ Database Performance tuning, architectural design, and development.
⚡ Initial observability tooling advocate.
Things I Used
MSSQL Server, PowerShell, AWS, AWS SDK, Terraform, Lambda, S3, Athena, Chatops w/Slack, ECS, Docker, Datadog, Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf. Python, C#, Excel when I absolutely no other choice, …and a lot more.
Public Artifacts
Product related work under NDA
Blog posts on various general concepts related to Databases, DevOps, PowerShell, AWS, and technology
Implementation Guide This was a major effort in migrating content from an outdated large word doc to static generated website with analytics. Load testing, sizing guides, and more were improved. All docs for SQL Server and load test summaries were due to my efforts. CI driven via markdown file updates made this a quick process to keep things up to date. 👍
2011-2014 Selene Finance SQL Developer
Initially rehired for Asset Analyst work, was recruited into development team after learning SQL. Continued with full SQL Server development
⚡ Relational database design performance, development, and
production support
⚡ Performed work on business analyst, qa, and developer for the work assigned.
In case you are bored, I’ve done this as well:
Freddie Mac: Loss Mitigation during mortgage crisis
Litton Loan Servicing: Loss Mitigation during mortgage crisis
Greentree Servicing: Mortgage Collections
Synergetic Communications: Mortgage Collections
Vanderbilt Mortgage: Mortgage Collections
Worked at a private school teaching
Worked at a Library & Migrated an entire small military base library from one building the other. The darn dewy decimal system is what I blame for my eyes now. 😁
I’m really glad I’m not working in the mortgage industry & collections oriented roles anymore.
It did teach me to handle high stress situations and do pretty decent at negotation and grow stronger in my communication skills, so there’s some positive to that part of the journey! 😉
Trivia
First Programming Language: vba 😆
Dark Or Light: join the dark side
Preferred OS: any. Right now using macOS for development, and working in Docker containers when possible
Terminal: Iterm2 & I ❤️ pwsh
As always, any posts on this site are not a reflection of my past or present employer.
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