I’m a generalist operations engineer & software developer who thrives on improving other engineers’ velocity and quality of life, ideally at remote-friendly companies with a positive, non-exclusionary culture who value balancing speed and sustainability. For additional details on what I seek in a role and/or an employer, please see my hiring page.

Highlights

  • Remote-based, residing in New Jersey, USA (which has an income tax agreement with New York).
  • Python engineer since 2004.
  • Unix/Linux sysadmin since 2005.
  • Author and maintainer of multiple popular Python libraries (collectively accounting for millions of daily PyPI downloads), including but not limited to:
    • Fabric (fabfile.org), a task runner & SSH scripting library.
    • Fabric’s primary dependency, the SSH protocol implementation Paramiko (paramiko.org).
    • A modern successor to Fabric’s task management & subprocess feature set, Invoke (pyinvoke.org),
    • Alabaster (GitHub here), the default theme for the widely-used Sphinx documentation generator.
  • Contributor to a handful of other open source projects, notably Django and Graphite.
  • Member of the Python Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative.
  • Co-author of the 376-page Python Web Development With Django (withdjango.com), 2008, Addison-Wesley. It was in the top ten best-selling Python books on Amazon and other retailers for about a year post-publication, and is still sold today.

Employment history

Please note: all positions 2007 onwards involved production oncall duties.

  • 2024 — current: Senior Software Engineer at Reach Security, Remote
    • Evaluated infrastructure-as-code tools to replace manual AWS management processes.
    • Spun up a staging copy of the production stack using those IaC tools, so developers could stop testing in production.
    • Enhanced developer productivity (dev envs, test harnesses, code coverage, data wrangling, etc) with a centralized Python command-line toolkit.
    • Released multiple product features as part of a development team.
  • 2019 — 2023: Production Engineer at Jump Trading, LLC, New York, NY
    • Supported hundreds of internal developers’ source-control needs by maintaining an on-prem GitHub Enterprise cluster.
    • Improved reliability, functionality and speed of OS and programming language packaging systems via service upgrades, replication, server migrations, and client tool development.
    • Added functionality to internal (Django-based) alert/event platform used firmwide for oncall duties.
    • Improved server build system functionality via support for BMC API services (eg Redfish) and general maintenance.
    • Prototyped tools for trading teams’ compute grid, such as a small autoscaler framework.
    • Streamlined clients’ devops workflows by supporting their use of my OSS tools, and migrating services from bare metal to Kubernetes.
  • 2016 — 2019: Senior Software Engineer at mLab, San Francisco, CA
    • Streamlined app development with IaC-managed per-developer AWS environments, complete with secrets management, VPN tunnels & CI/CD stack.
    • Built automated cloud image creation/management system, replacing an ad-hoc workflow used to create new customer database servers.
    • Enhanced reliability/functionality of database deployment/orchestration system based on my OSS, which managed a fleet of 10K+ cloud instances / nearly 1MM database instances.
    • Improved security procedures/policies across production environment, IT, and office premises.
  • 2012 — 2016: (Lead) Operations Engineer at Urban Airship, San Francisco, CA
    • Improved operational reliability via orchestration tooling, CI/CD server management, ops truth-database feature hacking, and package build/distribution system development.
    • Scaled engineering & product teams’ observability capabilities via Graphite metrics stack (2.6MM metrics/min) with high availability, reliable transport, and graphing dashboards.
    • Streamlined ops and engineering workflows with IRC chatbot providing access to production tools (config management, build system, deploy queue, orchestration, oncall escalation/ paging, etc).
    • Fostered documentation-driven development practices and managed internal documentation build/hosting tools.
  • 2011 — 2012: Operations Engineer at Whiskey Media, San Francisco, CA
    • Provided business continuity by setting up high availability and backups for the central PostgreSQL database.
    • Improved observability with a metrics/alerting/dashboard system, and centralized formerly adhoc logging/eventing system into an ElasticSearch cluster.
    • Streamlined ops’ ability to deploy/scale by adding features to their Fabric-based configuration management and deploy tool.
  • 2007 — 2011: Systems Administrator/Developer at Digital Pulp, New York, NY
    • Improved productivity/observability as the office sysadmin/IT, providing VM hosting / metrics / source control management / customer websites / etc, on rackmounted servers.
    • Implemented business continuity measures such as onsite and offsite backups, power reliability for customer website hosts, etc.
    • Created/maintained customer website features in a variety of languages and frameworks (eg, Django, Rails).
  • 2005 — 2007: Python Developer at Stroz Friedberg, New York, NY
    • Electrified a legacy paper-based evidence tracking system via implementation of Django CMS and intranet.
  • 2004 — 2005: Interface Engineer at IconNicholson, New York, NY
    • Wrote HTML/CSS/JS for a number of national and NYC area brands and entities, in collaboration with designers and backend engineers.

Skills

  • Linux distributions: Debian/Ubuntu, RedHat/CentOS, Arch, Gentoo, NixOS
  • Programming languages (sorted by experience): Python, shell scripting, Ruby, HTML/CSS, JavaScript (JS), Rust, Clojure, Golang (Go)
  • Cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • Configuration management/Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Fabric, Chef, SaltStack, Nix, Pulumi, Terraform (OpenTofu)
  • Data stores: PostgreSQL/MySQL, Redis, MongoDB
  • Virtualization & containers: Docker/Podman, Kubernetes, VMware, Xen
  • CI/CD: CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Concourse, Jenkins
  • Secrets management: HashiCorp Vault, 1Password
  • HTTP: NginX, Apache
  • Monitoring & metrics: InfluxDB/Grafana, Graphite, Nagios, Collectd
  • Logging/events/indexing: ElasticSearch, Splunk, Rsyslog, Logstash

Education

  • 2004: B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA