Responsible for all aspects of the production running and deployment of Datacenter sized Mesos clusters. This includes the provisioning and deployment of new hosts and services. Monitoring of Mesos and Zookeeper clusters. Puppet and other custom infrastructure to manage and administer whole clusters. Part of the job involves having input and giving direction in the architecture of the systems/clusters. Writing glue code to manage the clusters as a whole.

This position, consisting of both planning and supervisory duties, took place in a department consisting of roughly 60 research staff, 30 support staff, 200 graduate students, and roughly 1500 undergraduate students. The infrastructure consisted of a very diverse set of machines and operating systems encompassing 30TB+ of data, 1500+ computers, 10GbE core network, multiple routing domains, as well as mail, web services, Oracle/MySQL databases, multiple redundant firewalls, and a multitude of other systems.

Planning duties comprised of drawing up plans and documents to determine future directions and initiatives for department infrastructure and presenting and promoting these to the department executive. Infrastructure plans included tracking and managing of the $400000 capital budget. Further responsibilities included managing the time and tasks of four people with respect to various infrastructure projects. This required liaising with development, hardware, and other groups within the university on a regular basis.

During this time I moved into a more senior role within the group and the department. Initially I trained one staff member to be able to take over most of the day to day management and administration of the backup system. I was point technical lead on the planning and implementation of an IBM S/390 mainframe as a departmental file server. After deployment, I was the person primarily responsible for the performance tuning of the S/390.

After this project, I ended up supervising one full time staff position, as well as one part time student internship position. These supervisions included task assignment, task review, as well as other day to day management and mentoring of the people in these positions. As a senior member of the department technical groups, I initiated the first inter-group talks, followed by participation in committee and implementation phases for integrated department wide backup, firewall and network changes, as well as more integrated technical administration.

During the tail end of this period, I was seconded for 50%, increasing to 90%, of my time to the SSG group. This was both a test for seeing how two separate IT groups within the department could be integrated, as well as to help out an overworked IT group within the department. During this time, I planned and implemented the wild-west network subnet, was part of the department email migration from zmailer to postfix, was part of the ldap project, and wrote and deployed a new moodle authentication method for the department course moodle site. As part of my secondment, I used a portion of my time to help cleanup a significant portion of outstanding request tickets, eventually resolving in excess of 200 open tickets.

Unfortunately, the department website was hacked during the later part of 2008, at which point I was the lead person on the investigation and planning and implementation of the recovery procedures that the SSG group ended up implementing.

Subsequently moved into the beginning of a management role, supervising two positions, still primarily responsible for the laboratory infrastructure. Supervision mainly consisted of time and project management relating to infrastructure systems.

Unix Systems Administrator primarily responsible for laboratory environments and infrastructure pertaining to same. Infrastructure included an Oracle teaching database, a dozen authentication servers, Unix and Windows file services, web and mail services, as well as a few custom labs for robotics, video processing, and FPGA programming. The lab environment consisted of roughly 200 graduate students, 1500 undergraduate students, and a variety of lab environments.

Primary responsibility was porting Mathematica to all the Unix platforms, as well as building test and release candidates of all their Unix based software. Primarily responsible for tracking down platform, compiler, and operating system specific bugs within the Mathematica software and fixing them. Was also a general sounding board for portable programming practices. Two main projects that were implemented was the automation of the XFE (X front end) build on 7 different platforms. The other project was the implementation of a company-wide source code management system, such that it was easier to track changes to the source code.

Administered between 450 and 500 computers. Operating systems in use were: SunOs 4.1.3, Solaris 2.x, Dynix, MacOS, MS-DOS, OSF/1, Ultrix, and others. Hardware ranged from PC's, Mac's, Sun's including Sun 690's, 490's, 390's, Sequent's, and a spattering of many other type of servers. Additional duties involved advising faculty in the purchase of software and hardware. Made recommendations on operating procedures involving computers and software. In our "spare" time, we wrote software to automate the management of our hardware and software stack, aid in monitoring of systems, security, disk usage, performance, etc. Other software written was for the creation of accounts, installation of software, and many other tasks.

Worked for computer services on campus. Various duties, such as pulling coax and fiber for our network and new campus backbone. Wrote a new printer management system for the Novell server on campus. (Alpha & Beta code finished). Assisted in first student NT network installation.

Worked for computer services and library services on campus. Responsibilities involved writing various programs for the library. All programs were written on VAX computers, running VMS 5.2. Also, wrote a symbiont for VMS 5.2, which drove the campus HP LJ4's printers over ethernet, implementing printer accounting. Set up and maintained first local sun workstation, running Solaris 2.3.

Responsible for backup, managing print queues, and other duties as assigned. I was hired as a replacement for the local operator who was on sick leave at the time.

Set up and installed computers throughout the school division. In total, I set up close to 60 computers that summer. Systems included Commodore 64's, Apple II's, PC's, etc.

Taught an introductory computer course for farmers. Topics covered included MS-DOS, word processing, spreadsheets, and databases. Software covered included things like WordPerfect, Lotus-123, and FoxPro. I learned that I love to teach. I also learned that you need to teach at the level of your pupils, not the level the teacher is at.

I've been practicing Judo since 1992, with an absence from the sport between 1998-2008. At the current time, I hold a blue belt, as well as level 1 coaching certificates for Judo. I'm very happy that my previous Sensei (Silvio Sboto), and my current Sensei allow me to help coach and teach the beginners' classes.

The geek in me is always searching out new things to learn and try out. To that end, I've been reading and experimenting with silver, gold, and copper. I find that working in a physical medium lets me express myself in ways that code and computers rarely do. It is a refreshing reprise from the virtual and technical world that I enjoy immensely. In the past, I've worked on Mokume Gane, a rather challenging discipline which forges many layers of differing metal together.

Some of my pieces are of acceptable quality and have been presented as gifts to some of my friends and acquaintances. In the future, I'm hoping to be able to work on bigger silver pieces in the traditional Silversmithing techniques, using hammers and other methods to shape and create pieces such as bowls, pitchers, and cups.

It’s an addiction. I live and breathe computers day and night. Ever since my indoctrination in grade school, I’ve hacked, broken, fixed, and generally courted more than 15 different makes of computers. It began on a Commodore PET. My first self bought computer was a Commodore 128, which I took apart to the circuit board level, being able to attach extra modems and solder extra functionality onto the motherboard myself. Since those early days, I’ve had the pleasure of using hardware from the minuscule, all the way up to a Cray-2.

In the past I've contributed to a number of projects, including Athena/MIT X11, the LP-Mud compiler, as well as other projects. One of the things I enjoy very much, when sufficient time exists to keep the concentration necessary, is reverse engineering various things. One of the biggest personal projects I've undertaken is the complete reverse engineering of a Nissan 1990 300ZX-TT ECU. The whole reverse engineering was done from dumping EEPROMs, to creating custom code to de-compile, organize and comment assembly code, in order to understand the various functions. This work helped me in tuning my own 1990 300ZX-TT to 500+HP.

Currently, the bulk of this part of my life consists of creating various scripts and small programs, usually to feed my drive for continuous learning.

I tend to be a fairly active person. In the distant past I've been known to play an accordian (and might still be able to play a tune or two). I've owned and devoured an extensive collection of books in both English and German, and as time allows, continue to read in both languages. I've also been known to enjoy dancing, and have taken 2-3 years worth of dance classes. Some of the patterns have stuck enough for me to manage to lead a partner through a variety of dances.