I'm a versatile technical person with many solid years of Systems Administration and Site Reliability Engineering experience. I write clear and concise documentation that's easy to read and that condenses complex information into easy to understand language. I can build deep technical system solutions with high availability, high reliability, low downtime and with reasonably quick deployment.
I work well with software developers to get complex software solutions installed timely. I can also help developers debug problems in the environment and offer non-obvious solutions.
I have full understanding of system monitoring, like Nagios, including building way too many monitoring scripts as part of every deployment. I am versed in systems like Puppet and GIT to quickly and quietly automate deployments and keep system environments stable and consistent. I've worked with Jenkins on software deployments. Though I don't profess to be that 'devops guy', I can certainly hold my own.
Having touched far too many UNIX systems in my career, I have installed a fair few from scratch, rebuilt a few from scratch, dropped to single user mode to fix broken filesystems and messed with far too many kernel parameters in hopes of tweaking an ounce more power out of a database or coax a bit more performance from a web server.
While remote management features have changed and improved over the years from the old hardwired KBM systems to the newer network based ILO and iDRAC, it still baffles me that these newer network management systems fail as often as they do.
A few of my skills include working with networking at all OSI layers, though I'm obviously most familiar with the application layer (L7) and occasionally the presentation layer (L6), which is generally where most of the apps spend the vast majority of time and where I spent most of my time debugging. Though, of course, I've had my fair share of Wireshark deep dives in hopes of finding that ever elusive TCP needle in a PCAP haystack. I usually find them.
I have worked with analytics systems, like Splunk, of which I have mixed views on whether these types of analysis systems are truly useful. Oh, they're great at presenting logs graphically, but these graphs are so easily misread and misinterpreted, Splunk can require more time explaining the graph output results than fixing the underlying system problem being shown by the graph. No, I don't want to be known as that Splunk guy, either.
As for email, I've sent far too much on it. Not that email is a bad thing, really. The last couple of jobs were at email marketing companies where over the time I worked there, the email systems that I designed, built and managed sent billions of marketing emails. I didn't personally send them myself, no. But, my hand helped to design the systems which enabled those billions of emails to be delivered to inboxes all over the world. You've probably even received one or two of them.
Which leads me to... being that SRE guy. I'm okay with having that the site reliability moniker, though. In fact, I like managing site reliability. Yes, I've done my share of deep midnight dives into exactly why a MySQL server has inexplicably crashed for no reason. Well, not no reason, but for "no obvious reason." I do eventually determine the reason and cause, which is usually related to memory (or, more specifically, someone doing something they shouldn't). Yes, software developers can and do actually write SQL statements that build immense temp files that drain every last bit of memory and hard drive space from the system. I always smile when I find these. Though, I'm not so sure the developer is as happy to learn of that misstep.
On Upwork, my idea is simple. To help bring my extensive systems engineering knowledge, experience and skills to those in need and help design solutions, solve problems and document those solutions clearly.
My expertise is not limited to Linux, though. I've managed Windows, MacOS X, Linux, FreeBSD and many other operating systems and network systems. I'm also accomplished at writing Bash, Perl and Python scripts as well as writing C language applications. If you have a problem, chances are that I have your solution. Don't be shy. Hit me up.
Writing
WordPress
Apache HTTP Server
Linux
MySQL
Computer Network
DNS
Python
C
Copywriting
Bash Programming
Unix System Administration
Linux System Administration
System Administration
Systems Engineering
