I enjoy creating systems that work well and make life better, both for end-users and developers. I like to automate as much as I can. I am a fast learner; I enjoy exploring new technologies and systems and finding ways to apply them in my work.

Experience

Systems Engineer, Tech Lead, Engineering Manager

Cloudflare, 2017 - present

Senior Software Engineer

The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 - present

  • Technical lead for Web & Contract Services in ITS Applications, a team which builds and maintains a wide variety of websites and services for large audiences and user bases, both on and off campus.
  • Built an off-campus emergency website for the university, ensuring a stable web presence for the university and allowing multiple departments to communicate with the university community in the event of a severe IT outage or physical emergency. (Puppet, Apache, Drupal, Varnish, cloud servers).
  • Designed and built a web hosting infrastructure for the university’s new Drupal-powered main website. (Puppet, Apache, Varnish, memcached, PHP)
    • Integrated with the existing hosting environment, allowing us to maintain legacy web content under the same domain name.
    • Built a deployment process for the site using Jenkins, git, and Fabric (Python).
    • Developed JMeter testcases and tuned components for performance.
    • Worked with system administrators to develop zero-downtime maintenance processes.
  • Maintained a GMail sign-up portal which uses Google APIs and campus directory services to allow students, faculty, staff, and alumni to sign up for new GMail accounts. Took ownership of vendor-developed code and provided on-going support and enhancements for the application. (PHP, Apache, LDAP, OpenAM)
  • Maintained and administered several university-wide services, including a large WordPress Multisite instance and an Atlassian Confluence wiki service. Developed scripts, plugins, tools, and documentation in support of these services. (PHP, Python, Puppet, Apache, Tomcat, Linux, LDAP)
  • Connected sites to UTLogin, a single sign-on service based on OpenAM.
  • Developed Puppet modules for managing our team’s websites and services.
  • Created Splunk queries and dashboards for monitoring websites and services.
  • Developed solutions for other university departments on a contract basis.
  • Introduced a chatbot to the team’s Jabber room, providing JIRA issue lookup, service outage alerts, deployment notifications, bus arrival times. (Hubot, NodeJS, CoffeeScript, Docker, RSS, capmetro.org)

Firmware Engineer

IBM Power Systems, 2006 - 2010

  • Designed, developed, and tested C++ firmware applications on embedded Linux platform.
  • Created several tools to increase team efficiency, including a hardware test automation and patch-level management tool (Python, PyGTK, Glade) and a Sametime instant messaging plugin (Java).



Graduate Research Assistant

University of Texas School of Information, 2008 - 2009

  • Contributed to professor’s open source Ruby on Rails project: developed user interface elements, bug fixes, and other improvements. Aided in configuring and maintaining Linux servers used in hosting this project and class projects. (Ruby, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Apache, mod_passenger)
  • Served as technical advisor to students building a web-based digital library as a course project.
  • Developed and maintained course web pages.

Verification Engineer

IBM Microelectronics, 2001 - 2006

  • Designed, developed, and executed test cases for chip-level and unit-level verification and simulation of PowerPC based chips, including XBox 360 processor, Cell processor, and PowerPC SoC’s.
  • Spearheaded effort to automate daily model builds. Developed scripts and tools, educated colleagues on build process and use of scripts.

Education

MS Information Studies

School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin 2009

  • Coursework focused on Usability, User Experience, and Information Architecture.
  • Capstone Project: developed a prototype for a new on-line campus map; designed and conducted usability testing to evaluate the existing campus map and the new prototype. (JavaScript, jQuery, Google Maps API, KML)
  • Built a digital library showcasing digitized materials from the Harry Ransom Center’s Selznick Collection. (PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Collective Access open source collections management platform)
  • Conducted user testing and usability evaluations of several websites.

BS Electrical Engineering

Texas A&M University 2001

  • Specialization in Computer Engineering. Minor in Mathematics.

Personal Interests

  • Home automation - lights come on when I walk in a room, the front door unlocks itself for me! (Python, MQTT, ZWave)
  • Bicycles - I ride to work almost every day.
  • Raspberry Pi, Arduino, LEDs, electronics - sometimes I still like to mess with hardware.
  • Kites, aerial photography, flying things