About

Work Experience

• DevOps Engineer, ZOO Digital

  Mar, 2023 - Present

  While working at ZOO, I have been at the forefront of a new observability implementation built around industry-leading systems like Loki, Prometheus and CloudWatch. I've been working to assist the business define its performance issues and assist in resolving them, as well as maintaining the uptime & stability of software stacks. This has included heavy use of AWS resources, from EC2 to RDS and SQS, working in a heavily-automated GitOps environment close to both developers and AWS to provide good solutions to development needs.

  • Lots of usage of AWS (with services like EC2, EKS, ECS, RDS and SQS) to provide stable experiences to customers

  • Extensive usage of TeamCity to build, image, and deploy developer software teams' products to customers like Disney, Paramount and HBO.

  • Implemented the Grafana stack, including Prometheus (Mimir), Loki and Grafana Agent, to centralize & add missing value to instrumentation from servers, containers and applications, handling gigabytes of ingested, aggregated and alerted logging and metrics data per day.

  • Supported Django applications of varying sizes, from small addon systems and internal tooling to large, high-traffic end-user applications like ZOOstudio and ZOOcore.

• Systems Administrator, ESP Projects Ltd

  Nov, 2022 - Mar, 20234 months

  While working at ESP, I have developed large amounts of Linux, containerisation and automation experience over the course of three years. As I gained more skills and responsibilities with regards to our infrastructure, my role evolved to being the primary Systems Administrator within the Software team. My focus was then mainly on keeping our infrastructure and software stack up to date, secure, and in line with industry best practices. This work led me to implement various tools such as Kubernetes, Pulumi, Terraform, Mozilla SOPS, GitOps software like Flux CD, and CI tooling like GitLab CI and Github Actions.

  • Implementation of internal tooling to help speed up and improve development, deployment and maintenance flows for ESP's suite of applications & services. Primarily written in Go for ease of distribution and code complexity reasons.

  • Orchestration of data-backed automation using Ansible, Terraform, Pulumi and Netbox to deliver automated instance setup & configuration without the need for human intervention.

  • Implementation of internal and cross-team IPAM with NetBox, including creating network & server rack documentation that was previously difficult to maintain

  • Deployment of ESP applications & internal tooling to DigitalOcean on VMs (Droplets) as well as Kubernetes (via DOKS).

  • Led experimental deployment tooling investigations into Microsoft Azure, using platforms like AKS, App Service, and Blob Storage.

  • Helped maintain & automate internal & client-facing PHP applications, including implementing observability pipelines to monitor the state of applications, databases, and backups for a better understanding of the business continuity 'big picture'.

  • Designed, built, and deployed several Laravel applications, both with and without containerisation tools like Docker.

• Software Engineer, ESP Projects Ltd

  Apr, 2020 - Oct, 20222 years 7 months

  During my time at ESP Projects, I worked with PHP and Laravel SaaS applications with complex codebases. Through my own interest in the DevOps culture, I began taking on tasks to introduce automation and containerisation into our team's primary product. This gave us the ability to deploy to a broader range of systems, with fewer installation steps and software dependencies. I also worked on introducing workflow improvements to the team, such as implementing & enforcing PHP's PSR4 compliance with the help of my line manager, and code review processes to ensure quality of the code being put into production environments.

  • Designed and implemented crucial components to deliver value to customers of the Core application, including file uploads for content records and an administrative panel for internal debugging & configuration

  • Helped write server setup scripts with Ansible to reduce the time needed to set up new VMs, as well as reduce the uniqueness of each server to make sure their configuration is consistent.

  • Deployed multiple PHP & Laravel applications DigitalOcean using tools like NGINX, Traefik, Apache HTTPd, Docker and Webmin.

  • Oversaw the successful and relatively pain-free rollout of Rocky Linux 8 & 9 to replace the soon-EOL CentOS Linux 8 fleet of servers being run.

Skills

Education

Volunteer Work

Interests