I working on my hard sci-fi novel about data centers in space, practicing bass guitar, and learning MIDI synthesizers.

This is a "DevOps" group but not in the traditional sense. This team was actually formed from two teams: "Instance Automation" supporting the internal automations in the ServiceNow private cloud and "CORE" which supported IAM and Access issues, CMDB and Discovery, HVIs, etc.

I'm learning about the ServiceNow cloud (from the inside). App and database servers; scalable, redundant, flexible. MariaDB and replication in volume. Secure. Puppet and Ansible for automation.I needed a structured info repo on my laptop and used Docker (docker-compose, actually) to create a dual container local Apache/PHP/Mediawiki/MariaDB server.

I'm working on a pre-existing Ansible codebase to provision Linux EC2 instances in AWS and to audit the configuration of those instances in a MySQL CMDB database. I've configured gitlab-runner pipelines for deploying code and artifacts to servers. I've written Bash scripts to invoke AWS CLI commands/jq to automate processes. I've written a minimal front-end GUI in PHP to provide access to the various playbooks (click button to invoke a playbook). I've tested Ansible playbooks against EC2 instances (in a "sandbox" AWS environment) and against Vagrant/VirtualBox VMs. I've written a "bootstrap" Bash script that installs and configures all required packages prior to Ansible getting a hold of the server. I've supported Jira (workflows/statuses/transitions, Adaptavist ScriptRunner: Groovy, external scripts, listeners, post functions). I assisted in an account reconciliation process using Okta, Excel/VLOOKUP, and some Bash scripts.

I'm a contractor for Apex Systems placed at Intuit in their the Intuit Development Platform organization (part of CTODev) in an SRE position supporting an application called API Gateway. We're using Chef/Ruby, Python, RunDeck and other tools deploying and supporting apps in Intuit proprietary data centers and CodePipeline, CloudFormation, and other deployment tools in AWS.

I'm still placed at Verizon Telematics by TechM but, at the request of my manager, have shifted from DevOps to SysOps using tools like VMware vCenter, RHEL/OEL, Python, Bash, Puppet, Ansible, IPA, Xymon, Bluecat, Confluence, etc. I run the weekly CMB meetings. If I have to do something more than twice, I script it; if I have to run the script more than twice, I try to automate it.In July 2018, I returned to my previous Sr. DevOps position. I'm working with Teamcity, UrbanCode Deploy, custom Bash scripts, etc. I'm also handling any special project our technical team lead assigns to me.

Robert Half Technology has placed me as a contractor in a DevOps position at Verizon Telematics. Our application servers use both TomCat and BEA WebLogic. We use Teamcity to manage continuous integration (CICD); it communicates with our Bitbucket (git) servers and, when necessary, employs Maven to compile all of our artifacts. We use IBM UrbanCode Deploy to push artifacts to servers and local scripts to deploy on each server. We're using VirtualBox and Vagrant on OEL to create a "nested virtualization" development environment for Ansible. We're using Ansible more for automation than for configuration management. Our documentation is in Confluence; embedded documentation in Bitbucket uses "markdown".

I worked in a Tier 2 customer support group ("Systems Programming") that supported the back end IBM Power Servers running the Symitar/Episys software. While that was my primary job, my primary personal goal was to setup a wiki as a information repository for all of their groups collected knowledge. They'd tried four times with SharePoint but had used it as an unstructured "bucket" to dump information ("articles") into; if you couldn't search their "wiki" (and SharePoint doesn't have good search), then you could find the knowledge. I analyzed their knowledge domain and came up with a framework. I then got permission for a RedHat VM and configured Apache, MySQL, and MediaWiki on it. I created that framework in the wiki and then trained members of the team to be able to add and curate knowledge in the new wiki. Because MediaWiki had great search capabilities and because of the framework, you could search or browse the wiki to find what you were looking for. The last I heard, they are still using that wiki to this day. This was one of my favorite jobs.

Most recently I participated on an ETL team pulling asset/CI information from Remedy and other systems through a SQL server and importing it into ServiceNow.I've functioned as a software development/project manager, tracking the progress on each of our releases on an enterprise server/storage provisioning system, starting with the concept, requirements, and design through development, testing, and release deployment; I also performed all of the communications, documentation, & training for this application.Prior to this, I was on a team which performed all of the enterprise patching across Intuit's data centers. I wrote the scripts which performed the Solaris patching and contributed to the scripts which did the LINUX patching.Before this my work was (mostly POSIX) system administration (Solaris and RHEL) and scripting (Perl and Bash).During all of that time, my passion was information curation (documentation, user's guides, wikis, training, etc.), communication (newsletters, release announcements, blogs, etc.) and building communities (I helped build 3 communities at Intuit: DCOP Users, ICAN, SDPhotoSIG).