If you’re looking for an experienced developer/sysadmin, here’s what you should know about me (besides what’s on my resumé) and what I seek in a job.

Me

I typically enjoy operations (aka “devops”) and developer-productivity roles, with an emphasis on:

  • improving developer quality of life
  • streamlining dev or ops workflows via automation
  • generating system and service observability
  • paying down technical debt

The above can take many forms, including (but not limited to):

  • developer tools
  • build and/or deployment pipelines
  • metrics, graphing and dashboards
  • log/event streams
  • secrets management
  • configuration management and containerization
  • documentation

Work ethic

As a detail-oriented person with plentiful experience maintaining legacy systems, I have a deep understanding of how much future pain and frustration one can cause by cutting corners. Because of this, I tend to choose tradeoffs which favor sustainability over speed.

That doesn’t mean I’m incapable of meeting deadlines or making tough judgement calls, however – just that my estimates are more likely to bake in things like documentation, tests, or automation.

It does mean I tend to make anything I interact with a little better afterwards, as a side effect.

Python

Like any good operations person, I’m comfortable with a polyglot existence; however Python remains my language & ecosystem of choice and I’m unlikely to be happy if I’m not using it at least some of the time.

Open source

I maintain popular open source projects and wish to continue doing so. However, that work isn’t sustainable as a spare-time hobby, so I prefer employers which use or are willing to use some of my projects, or who otherwise value giving back to the ecosystem by subsidizing some of my time.



You

The following should describe you, the company:

  • Remote-friendly for US (NJ/NY) based employees – remote employees don’t feel like second-class citizens and are given the support they need to succeed, collaborate, and grow.
  • You demonstrably believe in periodically paying down technical debt instead of rushing ahead to the next feature milestone every time.
  • A low-stress oncall rotation. I’m happy to expand on my thoughts here, but some short examples of what this means can include:
    • Non-ops engineers participate in rotation for the services that they write, alongside any dedicated ops folks.
    • Staff aren’t responsible for their non-oncall duties during a pager shift.
    • Pager-holders feel empowered to fix noisy pages shortly after the offending shift.
  • You have a positive, non-exclusionary culture which values empathy.
    • Ideally, you’ll have a commitment to hiring and empowering disadvantaged or marginalized groups.
    • You lack toxic or “techbro” employees.

Let’s talk!

If nothing above sounds like a deal-breaker, please contact me, preferably via email at jeff [at] bitprophet [dot] org. Thanks!