While I’ve been freelancing for quite a while, I also used to work for other people. Most recently I worked for HubSpot for a while last summer. This “career as ‘NASCAR slide’” image was one of my favorite moments at the end of my last tenure among the daywalkers.

My technical CV follows. My entertainment CV is coming soon.

Manager, Tactical Operations, ITA Software
August 2006 – October 2010

Promoted in 2006 to manage support team for ITA’s flagship product, QPX.
Organized individuals with disparate project focuses into a unified group
responsible for all aspects of data delivery and response accuracy for QPX
across more than 2,500 machines serving more than 65% of all US online
airfare shopping. Grew that team to its current size of ten admins with
two coordinators and relieved the oncall burden of developers in Ops.

Created ITA’s canonical source of operational documentation now in use by
all operational teams with more than 3,500 articles defining services and
alert/incident response. Refined monitoring to reduce alert noise and
improve focus on real problems in production.

Worked to expand ties between oncall sysadmins and 24×7 NOC staff.
Conducted frequent offline and in-the-moment trainings and reduced average
oncall engagements from 60 to 20 calls per week despite ITA’s customer
base and product offerings increasing continuously.

Reduced off-hours work and engagements for Tac engineers from an average
of 50 per week by automating standard tasks and migrating tasks to 24×7
staff; currently only 3-5 deployments per week are hand-executed by
engineers.

Managed large scale deployments for strategic ($10M/yr+) customers.
Coordinated engineers and support staff across multiple groups for
specialized customer rollouts and industry changes. Served as crisis
manager both when remote and on site, quarterbacking incident response
between Operations, Engineering, and Commercial groups to ensure swift
resolution and reduce impact to customers.

Linux Systems Administrator, ITA Software
January 2006 – August 2006

Hired to be the second sysadmin for ITA’s airline reservation systems
offering. Spent first three months training from the first sysadmin, then
assumed all sysadmin duties for the project when he left the company.
Routinely performed emergency deployments to the beta project to fix critical
issues. Trained my replacement when promoted.

Participated in 24/7 oncall rotation averaging more than 60 calls per week
in support of ITA’s core products. At the time, no operational documentation
existed; support expertise came only through experience and word of mouth.

Product Support Analyst, Lycos Inc
April 2004 – January 2006

Tasked with the singlehanded operation and upkeep of a dating product
based on a sparely documented 20 year-old legacy codebase in a proprietary
nonstandard programming language. Stablized the existing 120+ server
architecture with proper Nagios monitoring and the implementation of
automated maintenance tasks, including tools to soften the impact of a
constant deluge of spam on the product’s SMTP-based content management
system; the spam fighting tools have since been ported to various products
throughout the company including the corporate email systems. Completed
extensive repairs and rearchitecture including hotfixes to poorly
configured RAID arrays on the product’s core NFS server. Wrote tools to
streamline the existing release process from a full day to one hour.
Delivered all major projects ahead of schedule allowing product team to
regain significant engineering delays. My final projects focused on
working with the Web Publishing operations group on code releases,
maintenance, and NetApp administration and overseeing monitoring for all
system and products in the Web Publishing/Communities department.

Operations Manager, Stowe Telecom LLC
April 2002 – November 2003

Wrote a system of tools to extract and match billing, service, and
authentication information from a variety of unmatched sources including
MySQL databases, Excel spreadsheets, and Unix password files, normalize
this information, and import clean data into a licensed ISP management
package (Hawki/EngageIP) running on Windows 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server.
Developed tools to maintain this data between Tru64, BSDI, Linux, and
Windows 2000 servers running a variety of ISP applications including
Radius/Radiator for dialup authentication. Elements of this system have
been incorporated into current EngageIP releases. Recent projects include
design and implementation of a system to manage DNS records for hosted
domains via web and command line access to a Microsoft SQL database and a
solution for tarpitting spammers in sendmail on Linux. Managed small
staff of customer service representatives.

Director of Technology, Modern Humorist
September 2000 – March 2001 full time, consultant through April 2002

Migrated website infrastructure from rented Windows NT equipment running
IIS, Cold Fusion and MS Access to custom-architected colocated Linux
server running Apache, PHP, and MySQL, resulting in considerable
improvements in performance and reliability and a significant reduction in
operating costs. Established a corporate intranet and developed several
in-house applications using PHP and MySQL to track marketing data, manage
external content submissions, and send over 7,000 messages an hour to
Modern Humorist’s reader mailing list.

Principal, Thirteen Networks
March 1998 – Present

Architect and operate a small Linux-based co-op ISP; developed a
MySQL/PHP/Perl-based account and service automation system with PHP web
interface to managing hosting services for user accounts, websites, DNS
records, mail accounts, and billing for these services at both an admin
and user level. Designed and maintained security profile and managed
security and hardware failures. Developed failsafe remote fallback system
for mail handling and virtual web hosting. Wrote custom user-configurable
spam filtering system, and custom IMAP webmail client.

Director of Application Development, GroupTel
April 2000 – July 2000

Developed instant signup and activation package for new customers,
including live credit card authorization using perl and MySQL. Developed
cohesive service management and billing database for ISP and telephone
utility customers. Managed employees performing user migrations,
developing account management packages, and maintaining Tru64 and BSDI
mail, web, dns and radius servers. Administered RealMedia servers serving
24×7 video and audio feeds for WHDH and NECN.

Web Programmer, The Atlantic Monthly
September 1999 – April 2000

Developed user profiling system and integrated discussion forums used on
The Atlantic’s main website using perl and MySQL. Developed secure
content publishing system across staging and production webservers.
Developed applications using perl and PHP for use on The Atlantic
Monthly’s websites, including user profiling system and integrated
discussion forums. Advised on the selected and implementation of
publishing software to integrate print & web delivery. Customized and
installed open-source text search engine. Administered colocated Linux
servers running sendmail, Apache, MySQL, and RealMedia services.

Senior Development Engineer, Gomez Advisors
June 1998 – August 1999

Developed intranet-based content management system using perl and Postgres
controlling the publishing, syndication, and archival of articles and
research for distribution to the public and licensed clients.
Administered Linux and Windows NT mail, DNS, web, and database servers.
Developed system and network monitoring tools, including a failover system
for remote backup DNS and web servers. Implemented security policies and
maintained active monitoring. Developed mail filtering system to secure
internal LAN against viruses and other hostile email. Developed targeted
marketing sites for licensed clients.

Web Developer/System Administrator, Inline-Design
a business unit of The Internet Access Company (TIAC)
October 1997 – June 1998

Developed live external and internal ISP network status/outage monitoring
and notification system. Designed and developed TIAC’s customer service
intranet, featuring technical documentation, a ticket-based fax-on-demand
system, and web-administered employee directory. information and online
fax capability. Administered Solaris and IRIX servers running Netscape
Commerce server, live credit card processing, and RealMedia streams.
Oversaw development group, active contracts, and client relationships.
Developed new client sites and performed maintenance and expansion on
sites for existing clients. Taught HTML and web development classes for
TIAC customers.

My work experience previous includes two years of telephone and desktop
technical support with The Internet Access Company first as a Phone
Representative and shortly after a Senior Representative managing a small
team of tech support personnel.

CONSULTING

Conceived, built, and continue to maintain and expand “Proscenium”, an
MySQL/PHP web-based scheduling, payroll and employee management system
currently used by the Improv Asylum in Boston’s North End.

Gave a guest lecture in Northeastern University’s graduate business school
program on the role of the internet in the business world including a
technical overview of how the internet really works for the common
business user.

SUMMARY OF EXPERTISE

Application development using Perl, PHP, SQL (including Transact-SQL),
ASP, XML, HTML/CSS, Javascript, CGI, and shell scripting. Database
design, administration, and programming on MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server,
Postgres, and DB2. Systems administration on x86 and Alpha hardware for
Linux, Compaq Tru64/DEC Unix, BSDI, OpenBSD, and Windows 2000 Server.
Configuration, security design, management and performance tuning for many
Unix server software packages including Apache, sendmail, BIND, djbdns,
MySQL, nfs, Radius. Implementation of monitoring for the above via
Nagios/NRPE, NOCOL, and SNMP. Content and configuration management via
Perforce and RCS. Security experience including Linux/BSD system
hardening, kernel firewalling, Checkpoint appliances, and server and
network IDS. Familiar with Cisco routers, PIX firewalls, and general
aspects of routing and port filtering for leased-line maintenance.
Experienced with Mac OS X desktop operating system and common user and
office applications.

I also DJ for the Boston Red Sox. Thanks for reading this far.

REFERENCES

References provided upon request.