Summary

Hello! I am a highly experienced Linux systems engineer, looking to work with the right team. If you are in need of a senior SRE with a focus on operational development, or a developer with a focus on design for infrastructure, here’s my resume; I’d love to talk with you!

Background

I left my previous employer last year, having planned to take a several month sabbatical. In a stroke of… interesting timing, my last day was the first week of March 2020. With COVID and lockdowns and the world in turmoil, I decided to extend my sabbatical and work on a bunch of personal projects.

A year has passed and I’m ready to join the career world again.

About me

My resume contains the essential details, but the nice thing about a blog post is it allows me to be more fluid. So let’s be fluid!

My immediate previous work experience was 8 years as a Site Reliability Engineer at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. Canonical was an 80% remote work company (and since became 100% since COVID), and I worked within a group of about 20 SREs, supporting the company’s operations, as well as interacting directly with the open source community. While I have experience with many Linux distributions, suffice it to say, I know Ubuntu inside and out.

I’ve been doing Linux systems engineering for over 20 years, and have worked with many people across the open source world. My claim to fame is Finnix, a bootable utility Linux distribution (LiveCD), geared toward system administration, rescue and recovery, etc. I am a Debian maintainer, an Ubuntu technical member, and additionally have packaging experience with Fedora and Homebrew.

While I can pick up nearly any programming language, I describe myself as a prolific Python programmer. For a portfolio example of my current Python ability, see rf-pymods, a collection of standalone helper modules. Docstrings on each function, 100% code coverage on unit tests, tox, GitHub workflows. For a more realistic example, see 2ping, a network investigation utility which was developed in 2010 and has been updated and maintained since. Tox, CI, test framework (but not (yet) 100% coverage), reasonable code and functional documentation.

Public cloud (I wrote the caching proxy software running the per-region Ubuntu mirrors on AWS, Azure and GCE). Private cloud (nearly a decade of OpenStack experience). Containers. Continuous integration (I even have my own lightweight CI system called dsari). The list goes on. And yes, I know Git.

About you

The top consideration I have with a potential employer is a healthy remote work lifestyle. I’ve been working from home for 10 years now, and recognize the strengths (and weaknesses) of a remote work setup. COVID caused many companies to shoehorn in work-from-home into their existing business strategy on short notice, while I’ve been most pleased with companies who have remote collaboration as part of their DNA.

That being said, I’m looking for a senior SRE position which has a focus on operational development. This can also take the form of a development role which has a focus on design for infrastructure. In many ways, these are one in the same. Open source development and contribution is strongly preferred; I do most of my work in the open, and value companies which do the same.

I’ve had experience with startups and are not opposed to them, but would prefer a mid-sized established company or a late-stage startup. Industry is not as important as the people and the teams. I am based on the US west coast and have extensive experience working with geographically distributed teams.

Let’s talk

If you’re excited, here’s my resume, here’s my GitHub profile, go give Finnix a try, etc, then send me an email. I’d love to talk with you.