About Me

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Table of Contents:

whoami

Architecture, design, and implementation of software systems is a strong professional and personal interest of mine. Whether I'm working on cloud, containers, systems; I love to dive into the technical deep-end of various areas of the tech space.

My experience engineering solutions spans the full stack: from system and database administration, to microservice development, to DevOps and continuous delivery, to single-page applications, to container orchestration, to mobile apps, to automated infrastructure management. My focus lately has been on end-to-end holistic solutions engineering, and embracing every facet of the tech stack.

sys/db

Through my experience as a system and database administrator, I found an area I truly loved. From 2013 I worked with database management systems including Oracle DB and MySQL, and maintained virtual machines across multiple server racks with VMWare ESXi to provision Windows Server and RHEL machines. There were various areas of my role that I found could prove more effectively managed by developing automated maintenance strategies; I touched down on automated backups and log monitoring for internal services as my first step towards development. This is where my interests in software engineering really grew.

While I maintained my position as a system administrator and database administrator, I sought out and implemented automation tooling around common tasks to reduce toil. I worked on internal services that would allow for easier work on the intranet, be it servers, hardware devices, and more. These include, but are not limited to, Python management services and backends, Active Directory hooks in Go, and web clients in Javascript. The road unfolded and I enrolled in Computer Science at Oakland University to continue my journey.

foss/linux

I have long been a lover of the open source mantra and free software technologies such as Linux, GNU, and Git. Prior to my work as a system and database administrator, I dug into Linux for my personal devices. Experimenting with various tools and technologies is a long-time hobby of mine, and I tried different server operating systems such as CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. I started off with Linux on my old shabby laptop with Fedora, and tried out a number of distributions over the years. By the way, I run Arch.

Through-out my schooling I have studied computer theory, software engineering, networking, operating systems, programming languages, and more. The curriculum alone was never really enough, and I spent time outside of school learning about various technologies like message queues, distributed systems, and containerization technologies like Docker. The premise of a kernel-level feature like cgroups providing strong mechanisms for isolated process environments was fascinating to me, and I found another interest then: DevOps. Having already worked for years as a system administrator and understanding the areas where automating functionality was hugely beneficial, I focused projects on more software around these practices. I contributed to open source software around version source control, and built out complete DevOps pipeline solutions implemented with distributed containerized systems. I provided a similar solution at my work to deliver a more up-to-date service for our development team.

fintech

Eventually I moved into a software engineering role, and joined Ally Financial in 2017. During my time there I worked on several projects. My first work was a project undergoing a migration from mainframe, where we envisioned a complete re-architecture of our central mainframe program into a massive series of microservices, batch operations, message queues, and COTS services. I designed security software for compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, developed data pipelines with DataStage, and engineered various utility services to assist our business analysts with requirements. In 2018 I later joined on a legacy application, working with J2EE and Struts with deployements to mainframe. I worked on quarterly releases and helped provide insight into automation technology and future steps for our digital transformation roadmap. Later on in 2018, I moved on to a project deploying to the OpenShift containerization platform, developing services that provided massive parallel operations and data processing. I worked with Spring Boot microservices with Redis as a cache for MapReduce operations. I also encorporated log monitoring with Splunk and AppDynamics for application performance monitoring. I was requested to join another team end-of-year 2018 and began work on my last project at Ally. I worked on Spring Boot microservices with an Angular front-end. I worked across the entire stack, developing Jenkins pipelines for continuous integration and delivery, implementing back-end services in Java, engineered our service authentication for our Docker containers, developed Helm templates for our OpenShift deployments, and architecting our performance-first lazily-loaded Angular front-end.

observability

I eventually left Ally in 2019 to join Dynatrace, a company at the forefront of distributed tracing and application performance monitoring. Today, their solution provides users actionable insights into their production environments across mainframes, back-end, front-end, mobile apps, websites... My initial role at the company was on the Davis Assistant team, which provides a virtual assistant that interfaces with customers via a web application, voice integrations with Google Assistant and Alexa, and multi-user integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams. My work there has included several projects I have been fond of, such as:

I have also worked on several areas as a part of the team. I love to dive deep in whatever area I work in, whether I am designing Docker containers or writing web applications, but I always provide feedback and help whenever my peers are in need. I also serve as my teams Scrum Master to facilitate meetings, resolve task estimates, and ensure the team grows together.

edtech

I joined the Platform Engineering team at Skillshare in 2022 as a Staff Engineer, focusing primarily on backend systems, implementing observability best practices and developing core packages shared across the organization. In my time on the team I have rolled out multiple projects, including a full IAM platform migration. I also led and facilitated a regular cadence of Ops Reviews in hand with our Site Reliability Engineering team, analyzing and implementing key metrics for our microservice architecture around Platform ownership, as well as documenting and delegating critical gaps across the entire stack.

Some of the packages maintained include authorization modules for NodeJS, observability modules for PHP, infrastructure-as-code automations for IAM, and more. Our team ultimately holds responsibility for the streaming and availability of all videos on the platform, along with key features for accessibility including captioning, subtitles, and translations across the entire suite.

In November 2023, I assumed the role of engineering manager for the Cross-Functional Operations team, adopting responsibilities across various key platform and infrastructure services and code bases. The team I lead coordinates across multiple domains including platform engineering, infrastructure operations, security, and quality. This marked a new stage in my career, requiring myself to be both removed from the on-hands work on a day-to-day basis, while also onboarding to new areas and becoming proficient in both technical skills, coaching, and new methods of problem solving to facilitate team and individual growth.

logout

I am extremely passionate in engineering solutions around complex problems, automating redundant operations, writing code, bringing users great experiences, reducing toil, and implementing practices that keeps my phone from buzzing in the late hours of the night. I enjoy leading teams to success across every facet of the software-delivery lifecycle.