DevOps and Observability Advocate
In my career, I’ve been an experienced technical generalist, and have worked with the majority of datacenter and cloud technologies over the last 15 years. I’m an exceptional problem solver and troubleshooter. I work best on a team with diverse skills and backgrounds. My broad experience and creative thinking allow me to design scalable solutions quickly and effectively. My career goal is to use my experience and creativity to build and implement tools that make lives easier for people working with today’s increasingly complex applications and infrastructures.
I am deeply passionate about DevOps and Observability. I believe in automating everything, and being able to see how everything is working at any given time. Administrators and Engineers should be spending their time solving tomorrow’s problems, not fighting fires that should have already been put out. I want to help them do that. As a Customer Architect at Honeycomb, I work hard to help Developers, Platform Engineers, and SRE’s get the most visibility possible into their applications and infrastructure, so they can be solving their customers problems, before the customers even know their is a problem.
Skills & Proficiency
Infrastructure as Code
Systems Administration
Automation & CI/CD
Scripting (Bash & Powershell)
Cloud (AWS & Azure)
Programming (Ruby & Python)
Application Architecture
Programming (Golang & Perl)
Professional Experience
Customer Architect
2022 - Present
Honeycomb.io
- Lead customers in the application of Honeycomb and Observability practices to meet customer’s stated technical and business goals
- Partner with Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to drive product adoption and customer expansion
- Work hands-on with, teach, coach, and mentor engineering teams and leaders
- Create high-quality reusable content including trainings, talks, blog posts, white papers, demos and examples
- Representing the customer in internal meetings with Engineering and Product Management
- Keeping up to date on Honeycomb technologies and product offerings
Senior Customer Architect
2021 - 2022
Chef Software, Inc (Progress Software Corporation as of 10/05/2020)
- Providing expertise and knowledge about Chef Products, DevOps best practices and associated technologies directly with customers
- Lead technical enablement needs for Customer Facing Teams
- Work with customer facing teams to establish and communicate reference architectures and best practices
- Support customer technical teams by helping to remove technical roadblocks, answer questions, and provide expertise as they achieve their technical and business objectives
- Bring customer needs and feedback back to product engineering to help direct feature improvements and awareness of bugs and other issues with the product
Senior Engineering Consultant
2019 - 2021
Chef Software, Inc (Progress Software Corporation as of 10/05/2020)
- Supported the implementation of Chef tools, as well as tools for other parts of the DevOps lifecycle (Packer, Terraform, Gitlab Pipelines, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, etc.) in infrastructures ranging from 500 machines to 50,000
- Took feedback and experience when working directly on customer projects and was able to commit that as code into the actual Chef product line, to provide needed features the community and our customers wanted
- Helped lead operations and development teams in DevOps transformations of their infrastructure and application delivery frameworks
- Led trainings for groups of 15-20 users on utilizing Chef tools
- Programmed Chef cookbooks, Inspec profiles, Habitat packages, and other code (Packer, Terraform, Jenkins) for clients needing solutions for both Linux and Windows infrastructure
- Worked with my peers to help establish and communicate best practices internally and with our customers
Linux Architect
2015 - 2019
Vertafore, Inc
- Improve Chef infrastructure to create a single, managed Chef deployment pipeline
- Build upon and create new Chef cookbooks and recipes to improve management of entire Linux infrastructure
- Implement improved monitoring and metrics frameworks, managed by code to allow better product insight from development to production
- Engage development teams on best methods to develop and introduce new technologies in their application design, such as ElasticSearch for log aggregation, Kubernetes for microservices, Kafka for event logging, and Rundeck for centralized job processing
- Coordinate with development teams to extend platforms and services to allow their migration of environments and services into cloud platforms (AWS)
- Received several accolades around key role in major projects including multiple data center migrations
- Developed Chef cookbooks, recipes, and resources allowing the rapid deployment of code onto newly built servers by application teams, as well as the ability to support several hundred systems via code, rather than individual administration
- Supported a wide variety of applications delivering SaaS solutions to customers
Senior Systems Engineer
2012 - 2015
Merkle, Inc
- Facilitated and maintained multitenant Hadoop installations, including balancing workload between business units for compute time on the clusters
- Performed as a key role in major project to migrate from Cloudera to Hortonworks for company Hadoop clusters
- Developed solutions for improved IT
- Improved customer service through training of lower level staff in their ability to respond to more issues and system failures, providing faster response time and shorter time to resolution of most issues
- Provided operational support to the Shared Platforms team in administering the environments being relied up by the company for the majority of data processing through MFT, ETL, and Centralized Scheduling solutions
- Platform owner for IBM Sterling B2B Integrator
- Platform owner for IBM Sterling Connect:Direct
- Platform owner for Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
- Provided Tier 3 support for Linux systems
- Provided additional operations support for Windows, storage, and software platforms
Senior Systems Engineer
2010 - 2012
FINRA - Financial Industry Regulatory Agency, Inc
- Assisted in the engineering of an isolated operating environment running vSphere4.1 on Dell servers, EMC Clarrion SAN storage, Brocade Fiber Channel Switches, as well as Windows and Linux VMs
- Built and managed RHEL 5 virtual machines running in two virtual clusters, using RHN Satellite Server for configuration management and patch deployment
- Supported Windows servers (2003 and 2008R2)
- Supported MSSQL 2005, 2008 and Oracle 11g databases
- Configured and managed JAMS enterprise scheduling software to handle centralized scheduled tasks on both windows and Linux servers
- Setup and managed Sharepoint 2010 server with Business Intelligence dashboards
- PowerShell scripting for Windows servers (utilizing both VMware and JAMS add-ins) as well as Bash shell scripting for RHEL systems.
- Maintained and operated Netbackup 6.5 backups servers using Quantum tape drives
- Maintained open source tools for team communication and monitoring
- Operated in 24/6 shift environment providing all levels of support for client applications running on systems over two isolated environments
Systems Engineer
2009 - 2009
Apex Systems, Inc.
Unix Systems Administrator
2007 - 2009
Ciena Corporation
Junior Systems Administrator
2006 - 2007
Hampshire College
Helpdesk Technician
2005 - 2007
Hampshire College
Projects
These are some of the projects that I’ve contributed to or created.
Chef (Contributor) - Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code, automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed
Chef_Magic Cookbook (Creator) - A cookbook with resources and libraries to help run Chef in large scale environments
RapidUnfurl (Creator) - A Python library designed to pull and process metadata very quickly to unfurl URL contents into a JSON object that can the be used by other programs for portraying that data, similar to how link expansion works in apps like Slack