I am very experienced at designing systems and troubleshooting system issues, particularly in high-end networked, virtualized, and cloud environments that are operating at scale. I really enjoy getting deep into multi-layered, complicated and distributed systems, and working out the nasty edge cases, or identifying flaws in the system. I have been doing what is now termed "DevOps" for over a decade.
Skills
AI and Machine Learning Applications
- Designing pipelines for AI-assisted workflows
- Applied use of LLMs
- Prompt engineering
Virtualisation
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- OpenStack - deploying, running and using openstack systems
- KVM (QEMU) Virtualisation on Linux, VMware, CEPH
Deployment Automation and Monitoring
- Terraform, Heat, Openshift, Ansible, Puppet
- AWS, Nagios, ELK, Prometheus
Networking
- Ethernet, MPLS, BGP, IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP, IPSec, ESP, etc
- Understanding interactions between IP, Firewalls, VPNs, etc
UNIX
- Linux system administration
- Practical monitoring systems for large deployments
- Large-scale administration
Programming
- Go, C, C++, Python and many more
- Rapid prototyping
- Regularly review other's code and design
Designing for Reliability
- Designing for five-nines uptime requirements, with failures
- Designing in the ability to know where problems occurred
- Building systems that fail gracefully
- Documenting Designs
- Design in useful capacity for when failures occur
Breaking Stuff
- Analysis of designs and implementations
- Figuring out how I can break a system. How do we fix that?
- Predicting failure scenarios, and troubleshooting those that occur
Procedure Design and Training
- Designing and document procedures for others to follow
- Designing and running training courses
Work History
Modica Group
2021 to presentDeveloper Experience Engineer
Modica Group is a leading messaging service provider. As the "Developer Experience Engineer", I build and maintain systems to help developers and SREs focus on writing good code - including building developer environments, tooling, pipelines, as well as coming up with implementation standards and assisting developers and SREs in using them. I also integrate AI/LLM systems into workflows, such as automated code review and summarisation tools, and a chatbot.
Amazon Web Services
2020 to 2021Cloud Architect
I was a Cloud Architect at AWS. There, I helped AWS customers design and implement their workloads in the AWS cloud, or to migrate their existing on-premises workloads into the AWS cloud.
Velocix
2004 to 2019Systems Engineer
At Velocix, a provider of large-scale content delivery systems and CDN solutions, I designed and implemented processes for system deployment and maintenance. Key achievements include creating Python-based deployment automation tools that generated documentation and installation resources for thousands of machines, significantly reducing deployment issues. I also established deployment standards, built OpenStack cloud infrastructure, and served as a technical escalation point for major customer issues.
Previous Roles
Maintained customer firewall and internet infrastructure, and developed a network mapping system for improved configuration management.
I worked at Fonterra while at University, working on VAX/VMS and Oracle Systems.
While in High School, I worked for Northpower. I worked on the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. I built automation for the SCADA system, and also worked on a number of other software projects as required by Northpower.
Other Work
- Prior to Northpower, I designed and built a booking system for a campground.
- In the years while working at Northpower, during a break I picked up a contract with Southpower, to work on their SCADA system, after the SCADA supplier recommended me to them.
