About Me: I am a Senior Unix Systems Engineer and Developer with experience with Redhat, Debian Linux and Sun Solaris at very large scales. I approach systems administration with an emphasis on efficiency and automation, using my extensive programming skills to architect scalable and robust system installations. I have experience in all aspects of large scale server administration: evaluating hardware, hardware and OS installation automation, remote management, systems and configuration management, software distribution, BCP, metrics, monitoring and 24/7 on-call rotation. I have experience with all the typical internet servers for DNS, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, etc. I have developed complex applications for the web with LAMP (Perl and PHP). I know how to make an installation run smoothly and ensure availability. I am a self starter and I enjoy taking on new challenges and learning.

Experience Highlights

Flickr a Yahoo! Company
Senior Service Engineer
2010 - Present

• Responsible for production operations of Flickr website
• Manage Apache webservers, MySQL, and custom services
• Modernized Flickr operations with automation

Yahoo! Corporation
Senior Production Engineer for Search
2003 - 2010

• Manage over 100 thousand Linux servers in a large scale clustered 24/7 production environment
• Responsible for all aspects of server management and production software from hardware turn over to the customer facing service in a revenue generating and business critical production environment
• Developed systems to automate full host lifecycle allowing a host to go from production, fault, repair, verification, and back to production without systems engineer intervention
• Monitor, respond, repair, and maintain services to protect revenue and maintain a quality user experience
• Author and maintain a large library of custom Perl modules for Linux install automation system, custom configruation management, and most other infrastructure systems
• Design and build software to monitor, maintain, and distribute software to thousands of servers with terabytes of data
• Build supporting framework glue to combine disparate products into a production service
• Represent production interests in product design meetings to ensure product performance, availability, scalability, and security
• Business continuity planning (BCP)

Inktomi
Cluster Administrator
1999-2003

• Managed large clusters that powered web search and crawling
• Wrote tools and libraries for system monitoring, automation, deployments, and configuration management
• Developed proof of concept system that directly resulted in a partnership with Amazon for Inktomi Paid Inclusion system
• Responsible for running the web crawling system and writing infrastructure to support it
• Built software for distributing gigabytes of software and data to thousands of servers with extreme speed using a binary tree expansion with rsync
• Migrated from Solaris to Linux based infrastructure

Supernews Inc / Remarq
Senior Unix Systems Administrator
1998 - 1999

• Managed over 100 Solaris x86 and Sun Enterprise servers supporting high traffic web based product
• Built out datacenter in co-location facility from ground up and managed its operation
• Wrote software release infrastructure and change control systems in Perl
• Handled evaluation and purchase of hardware systems
• News administration of Typhoon servers for use in conjunction with web service
• Managed DNS and mail servers for corporate and 'free e-mail' system
• Directly managed several contractors
• Provided 24/7 on-call support

3Com Corporation
Systems Administrator
1997 - 1998

• Lead migration of over 700 workstations from SunOS to Solaris in an engineering development environment
• Administration of DNS, NIS, HTTP, NNTP, FTP, and SMTP (sendmail)
• Management of email (sendmail) system for 14,000+ users
• Firewall management
• Database administration and programming
• Lead effort to get internal groups to utilize the intranet web for increased productivity and collaboration

Internet Doorway
Systems Administrator
1995 - 1996

• Built from ground up Mississippi's first state wide ISP
• Setup statewide network of PoPs to service customers
• Setup all services for new ISP: Web, FTP, DNS, NNTP news server, sendmail for SMTP
• Developed custom applications in Perl for both internal and external customer use
• Provided customer support to customers
• Built company website

Qualifications

• Operating Systems: Administration of Linux (Redhat , Debian), Sun Solaris, Apple Mac OS X. Some Microsoft Windows.
• Networking: I can design, diagnose and debug complex networking systems and issues (TCP/IP, UDP) with tools such as tcpdump and work closely and competently with network engineers.
• Programming: Proficient with Perl, PHP, Javascript, CGI, Shell scripting. Capable with C, C++, SQL, and Java. Able to pick up new languages as needed very easily.
• Revision Control: Perforce, CVS, Subversion, and RCS
• Hardware: Sun, Intel and AMD Servers, Network Appliance, 3ware RAID. Able to diagnose issues with hardware and perform or direct corrective action. Have setup internal RAID controllers, direct attached RAID controllers, and network attached storage (NAS).
• Database: MySQL and SQLite
• High-capacity and high-availability web server architecture and programming with Apache and farms of servers including the use of hardware and software load-balancing solutions
• Extensive experience developing web based applications with Perl, CGI, and PHP with MySQL backend (LAMP) that are W3C compliant with HTML and CSS. Use of REST, XML+RPC, SOAP, and Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI)
• Experience managing complex projects and delegating tasks to others
• Productivity Software: Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, OmniGraffle
• Web Related: Extensive experience in Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, MovableType, Joomla, Wordpress. Some familiarity with Adobe Flash. Experience designing W3C compliant websites with HTML CSS

Education

Mississippi State University:
Completed 4 years of university coursework towards a BS degree in Computer Engineering with an emphasis in Programming and Computer Architecture.