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I love using technology to be a multiplier of human effort, especially when helping people pursue a cause for social good. I've spent the large majority of my career enabling all kinds of organizations achieve their social purpose, by ensuring that doctors are efficiently communicating, community services can provide accurate and timely help, ensuring developers can iterate and deliver quickly, and helping organizations safeguard the vulnerable people in their care. All of these objectives have been achieved through interesting mixes of both new and "boring" technology. I'd like to continue working to multiply the effectiveness of causes that I believe in through my love of software.
The core skillset that I've been using has been centred around Python, TypeScript, and React. I've also had prior experience with many other languages, and can pick up new frameworks, infrastructure, and languages with ease. Most of my experience lie with both software, and infrastructure back-end specifics of either monolithic, or microservice-based RESTful services. I am also a competent front-end developer, and have created UIs that are in every day use by end-users.
I am a passionate Linux user, and though I currently use MacOS for my development environment, I am well versed in using Linux for every day desktop tasks as well as using both Docker, and Virtualized Linux almost every day. I always focus on getting security right, and building on top of a solid foundation of infrastructure on any variant of *nix that is required.
Other technologies I've had every-day use of include AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, CloudFormation, CDK, Lambda and most serverless tools, etc), GitHub Actions, and Kubernetes. I've also had experience with many more infrastructure automation and management tools not listed here; some of these are listed in my employment history below.
- Interchange: Implemented an extremely secure and flexible AWS platform for financial services as the sole infrastructure engineer
- Mantel Group: Led many complex projects from migrating applications onto AWS infrastructure, to developing server and Blockchain applications from scratch
- dutyof.care: Developed the dutyof.care platform, from scratch into a highly scalable, resilient, fast product
- Redbubble: AWS and Docker SME on the team tasked with moving to containers, and AWS
- Odecee: Helped implement a PCI-compliant, continuous-deployment environment on AWS
- Odecee: Nominated for an internal award for simplicity on a complex project
- Infoxchange: Before Docker, implemented a containerised build system using LXC, auFS, and Puppet. I then presented the solution in a talk at Infracoders Melbourne[1]
- Built an extremely robust, self-healing data transformation
system that used minimal AI tokens to process large amounts
of often-changing data. For example, hourly ingest of event
data from various ticketing, venue, and other sources
- Significant savings in LLM token usage by implementing a
system whereby the LLM is used to construct deterministic
transformation pipelines, including heuristic understanding
of deduplication, understanding when robustness may be
improved, and health checking
- The system is able to self-heal when data sources change,
and adapt to new data sources automatically (for example
finding new sources via web search) without invoking the
LLM for every new piece of data, and without requiring human
intervention
- Utilized a "blackboard" pattern as a novel solution to the
problems of data enrichment
Great: Typescript, Postgres, graphile-worker, Zod, OpenAI API, React, TailwindCSS, Kubernetes, Argo CD, Kargo
Good: vitest, vite, llama-swap, llama.cpp, pgVector
Competent: Bun
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Platform Engineer @ Interchange
- Plan and build infrastructure for an ever-evolving startup in
a complex fintech environment, ensuring security at every
step without impacting developer experience
- Implement many organizational services such as VPN, and
configure shared security infrastructure
- Help plan and implement policies and controls for PCI-DSS and
SOC2 compliance
- The headline achievement of this project is that in a single
year, by myself I was able to implement an AWS platform that
both the developers barely noticed, and was able to function
as a financial services business in the US
- All infrastructure was built in a manner that had clear
pathways for how to transition from financial services to
full-blown banking infrastructure with all the regulatory
and security issues that go along with that
- Using Tailscale, implemented a company-wide VPN with SSO
linked to GSuite, and security policies for access control to
protected services - both internal and the ability to
transparently route traffic to external services with IP
whitelisting, via a protected internet gateway
Great: AWS - General, Kubernetes/EKS(AWS), Terraform, Terragrunt, Argo CD, Argo Workflows, CDK(AWS)
Good: Tailscale, Organizations(AWS), Transit Gateway(AWS), RAM(AWS)
Competent: ChatBot(AWS)
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Lead Engineer @ Mantel Group
- Plan complex projects when clients are mostly aware of only
timelines, and high-level requirements
- Lead project teams consisting of internal and client staff to
define Agile processes that help build a high functioning team
- Solve complex technical problems as they come up - most projects
assigned to me were in new and emerging technologies without
many pre-existing solutions to problems
- Migrated a high-profile DNS registry (not registrar) from
on-premises infrastructure to AWS. The scope of the change made
this the largest of its kind in the world, which introduced many
unique AWS challenges
- Infrastructure engineer for a high profile government initiative
implemented using majority serverless technologies and supporting
a high volume of traffic. This project introduced some novel new
deployment and application patterns combining CDK, TypeScript,
and Rush
- Sole developer of a blockchain-based POC for a new startup that
used serverless technologies to ensure the business wasn't spending
money when it wasn't yet funded
Great: AWS - General, Lambda(AWS), AppSync(AWS), API Gateway(AWS), CDK(AWS), Kubernetes/EKS(AWS), GitHub Actions, React, TypeScript, Python
Good: Rush, DynamoDB(AWS), EC2 Image Builder(AWS), Cognito(AWS), Ethereum
Competent: Terraform, Marketplace(AWS)
September 2017 - March 2020
- Create the dutyof.care platform, associated infrastructure,
user experience, design many and build many product features
- Ensure that the dutyof.care platform remains in operation,
at a high level of performance
- Collaborate with both technical, and non-technical customers
to help them integrate the platform into their business either
via software integrations, or additional features to aid in
human interaction
- Conduct employment interviews, and build a quality development
team
- The dutyof.care platform produces results to the 99th percentile
of its validation requests, excluding latency of source
databases, in less than 50ms
- Stability of the platform is excellent. Very few single points
of failure, and those that are singletons are not time-critical
services, allowing recovery without users seeing downtime
- Platform security is excellent; Hashicorp Vault is used across
all services to ensure that secrets are time-limited where
possible, and are at the very least highly controlled, and
access is audited
Great: Python, Docker, AWS, PostgreSQL, React, Kubernetes(EKS), nodejs
Good: SQLAlchemy, Flask, Hashicorp Vault, Hugo
Competent: Lambda(AWS), Prometheus, RabbitMQ
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Senior Software Engineer @ Blue Bike Solutions
April 2017 - September 2017
- Create, and manage both software, and infrastructure
solutions for a variety of not-for-profit clients,
mostly with limited budgets
- Act as a technical resource to allow other consultants
to design appropriate, achievable solutions
- Developed a prototype app for the Australian Red Cross
to aid in disaster relief in developing countries. The
end product showed how a light-weight app could sync an
inventory database when offline, and allow search and
update when out of connectivity
- Moved a legacy, but important software product from a single
dedicated server, to load-balanced, highly-available AWS
architecture that ended up as good as a cloud-native solution
Great: Python, Docker, AWS, PostgreSQL, React, Flask
Good: SQLAlchemy, Framework7
Competent: Java, Domo
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Founder / DevOps Engineer @ spruce.sh
September 2015 - April 2017
- spruce.sh was a startup that I tried to build right as Docker
was becoming popular. It was a different kind of Docker-focused
CI platform, based on my work at Infoxchange
- Product development and strategy for "a new kind of CI"
- Software and infrastructure development and management
- Log latency was significantly faster than many other CI
platforms - not seconds, but near-realtime just like a regular
terminal
- First platform to integrate Docker-based support services for
CI such as Redis, PostgreSQL, etc - at the time most people
were testing with SQLite
- Focus on low-touch integration into existing pipelines: If
you had a Dockerfile, it was almost no effort to login to
GitHub, build, test, and push
Great: Docker, Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, React
Good: RabbitMQ, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Immutable.js
Competent: Puppet, Ansible, Rollbar
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DevOps Engineer - Contract @ Redbubble
September 2015 - March 2016
- As part of the delivery engineering team, it was our job to
"help teams deliver value faster", carefully balancing new
technology and processwith business demands to deliver
features
- Acted as the team's AWS, Docker, and general DevOps expert
- Built a new Docker-based platform for very fast, and safe
deployment of microservices
- Reduced deployment time from 40min on the old platform, to
less than 1min on the new
- Built many tools for comparison-based testing of refactored services, similar to GitHub scientist[2]
- Built an application platform that replaced unhealthy nodes
with zero downtime for deployed services
- Implemented a centralized logging stack to help diagnose
issues across many disparate (including legacy) systems
Great: AWS, Docker, BuildKite, systemd, Debian
Good: Ruby, Rails, Packer, Logstash, Kibana
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DevOps Engineer @ Odecee (Australia Post)
August 2014 - September 2015
- Design, and implement CI, complex third party
applications, and a PCI/DSS platform able to
scale, heal, and deploy consistently in AWS
architecture
- Guide the engineering direction of Python
management framework to ease implementation of
complex automation tooling
- Nominated for an internal award for simplicity
on a very complex project
- Selected to work on the "Trusted Services Cloud"
project; A sophisticated build of a PCI compliant,
highly automated AWS environment. My main
achievement was the deployment automation of the
IDP suite that protected every server in the
whole environment
- Implemented a fully automated iOS build cluster
using both Ansible, and existing Puppet
manifests to build, and test iOS apps in the
same way as existing RHEL server apps
Great: Python, AWS, Puppet, boto
Good: Ansible, Bamboo, Consul, Stash, RHEL, XCode, Puppet
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Web Applications Developer @ Infoxchange
- Develop and debug complex web applications in
environments with both legacy and cutting edge
technology, using agile methods.
- Judge and create releases as part of a CI/CD
process, run retrospectives and generally
participate in a highly flexible and free agile
team.
- Months before Docker was released, I was tasked with building a new CI server for the team. My solution was an LXC-based container system that used AuFS for the root file system and was managed by Puppet in the background. This set Infoxchange on a path to very quickly adopt Docker when it was released. I then did a talk on my solution at Infracoders Melbourne[1]
- Played a vital role redeveloping Infoxchange's legacy search application from the ground up using Docker, ElasticSearch and Django. Again, this lead to a talk at the Melbourne Search user's group[3]
Great: Python, Django, ElasticSearch, jQuery, Perl
Good: Docker, PostgreSQL, CSS3, HTML5, Debian
Competent: LESS, YUI, Mojolicious, HHVM, Puppet
More employment history available on request, or at thatpanda.com
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Swinburne University of Technology, 2008 - 2009
Bachelor of Science (Computer Science and Software Engineering) / Bachelor of Multimedia (Games and Interactivity) [Incomplete]
This course gave me a stable footing in systems design,
usability design, Java programming, C and C++ programming,
3D modeling and various other facets of the game
development profession. I left to pursue a job offer
to work in professional software development.
Damien and I worked together to build dutyof.care, and Interchange
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Lead Engineer @ Mantel Group
Ross was my people guide at Mantel Group. He was privy to all feedback and performance reviews
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[1]: http://www.meetup.com/Infrastructure-Coders/events/127899532/
[2]: https://github.com/github/scientist
[3]: http://www.meetup.com/melbourne-search/events/187267272/