I am a network and systems administrator for College Works Painting, working primarily on Linux servers hosted on Amazon EC2, although we do have some Windows Server 2008 installs providing services in the office. In addition to my administration duties, I am also a sometimes programmer utilizing server side Javascript with Node.js, Perl, Python and Bash.
Administration Experience: I have been using Linux since the spring of 1997, and started with Slackware Linux 3.2. My first linux experience was recompiling my kernel to include the newly released drivers for 3com 3c905tx network card, at the time one of the best network cards available. I have been using Unix / Linux since then in one way or another. My first games of GL Quake were played on linux.
Programming Experience:
My first programming job was for Digital Imaging & Technology now fully owned by Lason, Inc.. At DI-T we would scan in FedEx and UPS airbills and transmit them via satellite offshore for data entry. I was the main developer on some scanning software written in Visual Basic 4 which was later upgraded to Visual Basic 5, using Kofax Image Controls to control high speed Bell and Howell scanners. Since then, I have been a C++ programmeer, a Perl programmer, a Web Developer, a Java Programmer, a QA Engineer, a Build Manager and a Unix Administrator.
Network Administrator
December 2006 – Present
Irvine, CA
At College Works Painting we use a variety of technologies to provide tools for our interns and employees to succeed.
Most of our infrastructure runs on Linux servers hosted on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure, this includes our web sites, our intranet, our database server, and our monitoring infrastructure. We use a combination of Stunnel, HAProxy, Nginx, Python, and Node.js for our live infrastructure. We also use Nagios, Munin for our monitoring system. One of my current tasks is to deploy Statsd and Graphite so that we can more easily collect metrics and data from our live infrastructure.
In the office we use Windows Server 2008 to provide directory and print services to our corporate desktops. We us an entry level network appliance for file services.
We utilize an Asterisk based phone system with some custom programming involved to handle routing of calls. We have it setup to check a MySQL database for the incomming calls caller id, and if it is found we route the caller to our IVR. If the incomming caller id is not in our database, then it is likely a customer, and the call is routed to our customer service department so that the customer can talk directly and immediately to a person.
United Studios of Self Defense - Rancho Santa Margarita
Chief Instructor
May 2006 – December 2006
Rancho Santa Margarita, CA
Opened the Rancho Santa Margarita USSD Franchise. Was responsible for all aspects of running the business, including recruiting students, teaching classes, training assistants, handling the accounting, selling supplies and training upgrades. This was one of the most instructive 8 months of my life, a time durring which I learned many things about myself as well as the pitfalls of running my own business.
WebReach, Inc / Mirth Corporation
Systems Administrator
June 2005 – May 2006
Irvine, CA
At WebReach, Inc now Mirth Corporation, I was primarily a Linux / Solaris Administrator. As a team we setup a remote disaster recovery site that was a full copy of our live site. We change dour deployment process to automatically deploy to live and the disaster recovery site. We also started a small project to automate the regression testing of our web applications using Watir.
Raining Data Corporation / Tigerlogic Corporation
Configuration Management Engineer
February 2003 – June 2005 (2 years 5 months)
When I started at Raining Data Corporation now TigerLogic Corporation, I was in the QA department. I was tasked with developing an automated testing framework for the TigerLogic database product. I also went to Install Anywhere training to be the backup for our existing CM Engineer. When he moved to LA, I took over as the CM Engineer. My first initiative was to unify our installers so that we only had a single installer across all deployment platforms. The second initiative was to integrate automated testing / into the build process.
Reef, Inc.
Senion QA Engineer
2000 – 2001 (1 year)
I started at Versify about 9 months before they were bought out by Reef (Not the footwear company). I was hired as a QA engineer since at the time I had extensive Java programming experience, and they were developing a Java based web content management system and needed someone to flesh out an automated testing suite.
Techfuel, Inc.
Software Engineer
1999 – 2001 (2 years)
When I started at Techfuel, I was hired as a Perl programmer, working on our web based helpdesk solution, TechDesk. Techdesk was quite a bit ahead of its time, and we ended up with a few large scale installs before the company changed direction. At some point, Techfuel decided to make the transition from being a VAR to being a Software Development house, and we hired a few excellent Java engineers and started developing our web community portal software.
We developed a comprehensive web portal solution in Java, using ATG Dynamo as our application server. This project utilized large amounts of code generation, and an in house ORM solution (Hibernate did not exist in a stable form yet). This project included modules for forums, news, targeted advertising, web mail, image and file upload and storage and general content management. Unfortunately the timing was such that we started this on the tail end of the .com bubble and funding ran out more quickly than we anticipated.
Techfuel was where I really learned how to be a good software engineer. Most of the good habits I have today started there.
All of my open source software will be stored on Github. So far I have contributed a small fix to a node xml library called LTX which is used in the Hook.io-XMPP library i created.
My current project is a rewrite of Twich.io as a library that can be included in an Express application or started on its own. It has the additional goal of being able to handle 1000+ users at one time in each chat room, as well as granular permissions, and the ability to disable chat for a subset of users.
Also on the horizon is a library this will allow people to write SQL queries, and store them along with a .json file on the file system. You can then map each query onto a URL using express. These queries will automatically handle cacheing of the data in Memcached, including going to MySQL when there is a cache miss.
