Notes on building cloud software and systems for humans

Professional Resume

Tech Lead - Observability at Rebellion Defense

Summary

Cloud systems implementation and management. Deep background in Ruby, AWS, Go, Terraform, and Kubernetes. Developer tooling and chatops expert.

Experience

Rebellion Defense

Technical Lead - Observability

2022 - Present

  • Leading a team of engineers in delivering observability services and internal products

Senior Backend Engineer

2021 - 2022

  • Stabilized multi-vendor joint integration efforts with hands-on observability leadership and automation of data interchange formats
  • Data engineering for ML exploration with Python and Go
  • Engineering and Project management for cross-team platform solutions

CrowdStrike

Senior Engineer

2020 - 2021

Backend web services, ops, and event processing at over half a trillion events daily. Golang, Spark, Kubernetes, AWS, ElasticSearch, Terraform, Kafka, Cassandra, Redis, Splunk.

Gremlin

Senior Platform Engineer

2018 - 2020

  • AWS-first platform and infrastructure strategy and leadership for fast-growing market leader in chaos engineering
  • Lambda, Kubernetes, Terraform, CloudFormation, and simpler traditional Linux solutions on a case-by-case basis
  • Robust automated serverless build and deployment workflows to support multiple engineering teams and products
  • Low-friction ChatOps solutions to bring operational tooling to where the team is
  • 24x7 continuous validation of production services with serverless API test tooling
  • Custom tooling solutions written in Go, Python, and Ruby when off the shelf solutions aren’t a fit

The Pragmatic Programmers

Technical Book Author - Build Chatbot Interactions

2017 - 2019

Remote

Author of the first and only book to bring an entire toolbox of powerful chatbased automation techniques to programmers everywhere.

Digestible examples written in Ruby and provided with full unit tests and go-toproduction guidance.

Clear Function

Senior Software Engineer

2015 - 2018

  • Piloted Kubernetes research to prepare our clients to move beyond existing VM-oriented hosting solutions.
  • Led research on serverless technologies in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud environments.
  • Built out a portable web server environment with Vagrant+Ansible and later Docker Compose in order to shore up a six-month legacy PHP support engagement.
  • Instrumented client applications and in-house products with industry-leading application performance monitoring, scalable background job processing, and fault detection analytics techniques.
  • Presented on company’s behalf at Southeast Ruby, Dev Space Conference, and Memphis Ruby User Group.

Railsdog

Chief Technical Officer (CTO)

2014 - 2015

Remote

as CTO:

Leadership and support for:

  • Product strategy, management, and implementation
  • Engineering process and knowledge sharing
  • Project staffing and recruiting
  • Aiding parent company’s portfolio expansion through product and service strategy

as eCommerce / BI Lead:

Delivered online retail storefront and fulfillment solutions customized to fit the business needs of a variety of clients:

  • Automated shipping rate quotes and shipping label generation
  • Online payment gateway integration
  • Cloud-based asset upload and storage
  • Project estimation
  • Technical leadership on eCommerce projects in all phases of their consulting lifecycle

Daniel Pritchett Applications Consulting

Solution Manager

2009 - 2015

Delivering bespoke applications, hosting, and services including:

  • E-commerce recommendation systems
  • Mapping and geocoding
  • Text and email messaging integration
  • Secured online content and profiles
  • Community building

Coroutine LLC

Senior Software Developer

2012 - 2014

Managing and delivering highly scalable mission critical web applications as a consulting developer: - Delivered two Spree eCommerce online stores to improve the market responsiveness of stores with multiple millions in yearly revenue each. - Implementations centering on Ruby on Rails as the core of horizontally scalable high-performance web applications - Configuring and contributing to the open source Spree E-Commerce framework for fully customizable online storefronts and inventory management - Replicated PostgreSQL, MySQL and MS SQL Server datastores - Memcached, Redis, and AMQP for high-availability transaction processing and message queueing - Chef and Ansible for server configuration automation - Cloud/VPS servers on Heroku, Amazon AWS/EC2, Rackspace, and Linode - Raspberry Pi-based lightweight onsite print service solutions - Cloud-hosted label printing solutions for onsite Zebra thermal label printing - Automated continuous testing and deployment of applications - Unit testing with RSpec to maintain quality levels as applications grow and change - Backbone.js for single-page Javascript-based web applications - Agile project management, work planning, and acceptance testing onsite and remotely - Directing implementation and support with clients and remote developers

Motega

Cofounder

2011 - 2012

Bringing cutting edge machine learning models from academia to the enterprise

  • Python + MongoDB data engineering pipeline

Fred’s Inc.

Senior Business Intelligence Programmer / Analyst

2010 - 2012

Managing and delivering retail business intelligence (BI) reporting and monitoring solutions integrating mainframe transactional data, line-of-business data warehousing, and marketing campaign data entry and management.

  • Chair regular corporate BI steering committee bringing together business leadership and IT leadership to set the course for future BI projects and growth.
  • Architect and implement data consolidation, reporting, and planning functions through MS SQL RDBMS and our BOARD BI platform.
  • Leading research on just-in-time reporting solutions, application server virtualization, and enterprise collaboration tools using cutting-edge open source languages and libraries.

International Paper

Business Intelligence Solution Developer

2005 - 2010

  • Automated over 10,000 pages worth of month-end financial reporting – moved from handwrought Excel to fixed format Crystal using Business Objects XI 3.1. Prevented $1,000,000 in estimated operational losses by successfully delivering solution in Q1 2010.
  • Created and promoted web-based power users’ community in support of the 30,000 licensed SharePoint users at International Paper. Researched and presented to CTO and IT Director on emerging trends in enterprise collaboration.
  • Delivered a first-in-company distributed sales planning system. Designed and implemented customized SAP - Business Planning/Simulation solutions to forecast payroll bonuses based on sales plans.
  • Saved $15,000 by designing and implementing a usability enhancement for SAP BW.
  • Analyzed and enhanced XML data interchange automation for integrating over 50 remote containerboard manufacturing execution systems.

Pate Holdings

Network Manager

2003 - 2005

  • Identified and fulfilled technology resource needs for a $50 million commercial real estate development company as the sole agent responsible for IT systems.
  • Improved network accessibility and security for 15-employee network by planning and managing a complete network upgrade from Windows NT Server 4.0 to Server 2003.
  • Delivered cost-benefit analyses to the owner of the company outlining the results of my vendor selection process for a Blackberry mobile connectivity upgrade.
  • Guaranteed data consistency and disaster preparedness via instituting nightly Veritas tape backups.

CARE Research & Development Laboratory

Graduate Teaching Assistant

2002 - 2005

  • Delivered a pixel-perfect Crystal report that enabled Alabama police forces to digitize existing paper-based traffic tickets. This improved officer efficiency and thus reduced the burden to taxpayers.
  • Engineered and delivered a PHP/Apache web application built on a fiveserver federation of MySQL databases. Provided written analysis with recommendations on improving the system’s performance and reliability.
  • Defended a master’s thesis on emerging criminal justice federated search technologies based on the federated database application I implemented.
  • Increased public safety through implementing and validating traffic accident analytics tools used by state governments nationwide with C++ and Visual Basic desktop applications.

Education

The University of Alabama