Jon Cotton's Location
Boulder, Colorado, United States, United States
Jon Cotton's Contact Details
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About Jon Cotton
I'm a SRE. I practice DevOps. I come from the software developing side where I've used Python for backend services, open-source Django projects, and operations frameworks. I revamped a site to use semantic HTML5, wrote an AJAX commenting app in Backbone, and turned another site responsive with Foundation. The JavaScript world speeds (stumbles?) along so fast though that I'm rather out of date. These days: I run on GKE, replace it all two or three times a year, provision with Terraform, package in Docker, deploy with Ansible and Helm, monitor appropriately at each step, instrument application code, and tie everything together with CI/CD and Datadog dashboards. I think about SLOs, error budgets, reliable and repeatable process, and end-user joy.Deploying stuff is awesome. Let's get change management under control, lock down a build/test pipeline, and start the speedy continuous deployment of high quality applications. My infrastructure-as-code is as elegant as my open-source contributions. I like enabling a good user experience while at the same time writing code that promotes a good developer experience.I _always_ plan big picture. Maybe to a fault. Which is why I balance that out in my coworkers. I can't not think about the ecosystem. If it's worth a v1, then it's worth a v2. Since it's a microservice (I mean right??), then it's important to plot its interactions in the stack with other services. Service boundaries and dependencies are overlooked unless you know to look for them. Rock ninja cowboy stars and super chickens do not build healthy software ecosystems. So last point—I am a superb communicator, which you already know from perusing this resume.Just here for some flashy stories? I used to hike, ski and sled for miles when I was designing and building remote monitoring, solar-powered, mountaintop weather stations. Extreme conditions.You should keep reading. \( ﾟ◡ﾟ)/
Jon Cotton's Current Company Details
Jon Cotton Work Experience Details
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Infrastructure Software EngineerAgerpointBoulder, Co, Us
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Infrastructure Software EngineerAgerpoint Nov 2023 - PresentResearch Triangle, Nc, Us -
Infrastructure Software EngineerRigetti Computing Sep 2021 - Feb 2023Berkeley, California, Us -
Devops EngineerDronedeploy Apr 2018 - Sep 2021San Francisco, California, UsI believe in microservices, the DevOps approach and the SRE implementation as much as ever. The cool cat vision ML and data processing engineers here need the same sorts of reliable, scalable, maintainable systems that I like to build. It's all Google Cloud, stamped out in Terraform and reviewed in Github. I do have some new career highlights:- Kubernetes is fantastic from insta-replaced deleted pods to Ingress with managed certificates- All compute is on GKE and we replace it entirely 2/3 times a year- IAM on GCloud is great- several things writen in Go- Google Secret Manager for all platform credentialsI've taken my Python microservice greenfielding to new levels with Poetry for venv and versioning; linting for styling, typing and defensive security techniques; structured logging; FastAPI framework; Docker or buildpacks for packaging and Cloud Run as the running environment.I replaced a VPN client/server infrastructure with Identity Aware Proxy tunneling managed by a zero-touch CLI application installable by any macOS fleet management tool. Low maintenance, high security.I introduced multi-regional, synthetic browser monitoring to support new markets for business expansion. I made that experience more welcoming by increasing marketing site performance by 70% with a CDN. Then enabled A/B testing in Cloudflare Workers with cookie sanitizing, user-subset caching and Sentry error reporting. Increased application time-to-interactive login performance by 76%, 70% faster time-to-first-byte, and 60% faster meaningful-first-paint by implementing gzip/cache headers along with Cloudflare CDN.Legacy modernization is my current lens for approaching and communicating about tech debt and systems that no longer perform as they need to for a growing, enterprised focused company. -
Site Reliability ArchitectProsper Marketplace Nov 2015 - Apr 2018San Francisco, Ca, UsMicroservices, the way to envision product and its architecture. It's the approach to software design and, keeping in mind Conway's Law, how to structure the engineering teams.DevOps, the process and methodology for writing software and deploying infrastructure to produce higher quality code with faster feedback.Site Reliability Engineering, the game plan for running and maintaining software and systems. SRE balances developer velocity with appropriate reliability.These three disciplines are the best way I know of to be nimble, responsive, flexible and adaptable. This is my mission at Prosper (a company with a very cool financial product btw). -
Devops EngineerConversant Llc Mar 2014 - Nov 2015Chicago, Illinois, UsI've loved writing beautiful software but what about running it? To figure that out--how to scale, monitor, auto-heal--I switched tracks into DevOps. I spent extensive time with Collectd, Chef, Fabric and Python to manage deployments on AWS and hardware datacenters. I prototyped a Docker framework, lobbied for microservices and experimented with Chronos, Mesos, and Consul. I always refactor and eat my vegetables. -
Software EngineerCenter For Investigative Reporting/The Bay Citizen Nov 2011 - Nov 2013Emeryville, Ca, UsWhat a surprise to work for a nonprofit again! I came on board The Bay Citizen to build out theopen-source news platform software we were creating with The Texas Tribune. Smartly built on top of Django (itself a venture born in journalism), the system is extremely modular and tailored to the varied needs of online newsrooms. It's a CMS for scheduled, publishable content with a clean data model, mixin feature expansion and easy hooks for providing your own templates (i.e. no generic cookie cutter sites).I'll say this, working in an active newsroom is eye-opening. The future of news is full of speculation but the industry requires software and an open-source platform is a pretty good solution.I rewrote the backend for a Seattle newspaper porting them to our platform (and an HTML5 responsive future), worked on core platform features and refactored our own complicated, exploratory system. 6 months in, we merged with The Center for Investigative Reporting. This was a great opportunity to expand the platform to meet the needs of a different type of newsroom.I wrote a CMS tie-in for Bit.ly link shortening, a "citizen journalist" submission process, a universal input sanitizer, an AJAX login/user menu, and a DRY view system powering normal and AJAX loads of every standard page on the site. (The last in a single day staying up to 3am fueled by peanut butter.) I created a page layout system for scheduling the complete look and content of any page or category of page. (Never got to build the truly easy front-end CMS UI though. Easy to use, not to build.) I simplified our cloud provider setup, fixed a pernicious CDN issue, established server monitoring, integrated client-side JavaScript error reporting and created a new infrastructure deployment. I wrote AJAX, user-permission specific, nested commenting. I built a modular, relational, embed-anything library that allows control over rendering third-party data and metadata. -
Software EngineerGravity Mobile/Gracenote Jun 2009 - Nov 2011I wrote servers to support mobile applications. In my last project, I was building a server that allows interactive content for/syncing to live television broadcasts. This system supports four client applications for four different shows on three networks including the Oprah Winfrey Network with Oprah's return to television. Previously I wrote the server, API integration and reporting system for a music identification service. The hardest part of that one was managing carrier-driven billing. Along those lines, I also revised an automated purchasing system for an IVR phone call-in service that generates $5-13k a day.I used Django and Python, tested on phones and tablets, and created AJAXy front-ends on my most enjoyable days. One of my favorite creations is an HTTP request director that quickly loads a shell page and then AJAX-calls itself to load graph/table data for any event type on any model. -
High-School Programming TeacherProctor Academy Mar 2009 - May 2009Andover, Nh, UsThis was a fun one. After stringing around Cisco radios for three months (see previous position), I became a teacher for the spring trimester and taught two classes for juniors and seniors—Web Design with Adobe Dreamweaver and Intro Programming in C++.Dreamweaver was the GUI facade to learning semantic markup and the separation of content from presentation. The overarching theme was organizing and communicating a message via the web.As for C++, I'd forgotten how hard intro programming is, i.e. back when you don't know what data structures are and 'variable', 'function' and 'loop' are vocab. I wanted to build up to "something useful" and quickly realized that was extremely difficult starting at knowledge = 0; We did get to pointers, polymorphism and, most important, modular thinking. -
Wireless Network EngineerProctor Academy Nov 2008 - Jan 2009Andover, Nh, UsRemember when the economy dropped like a rock in late 2008? Plans changed and I crafted an opportunity to bring my extreme-conditions networking experience to my high-school by expanding their wireless LAN into the more remote locations of campus.I bridged the main network to a mile-distant, off-campus ski area with some LMR-400, lightning protection, an overkill grid antenna and general purpose Cisco 802.11b radios (super cheap on eBay). Two additional hops covered the entire base and ski lodge. All connections were authenticated by central management software. After that, I hooked up the hockey rink (metal buildings are great at signal blocking) and redeployed building-area wireless in various dorms. Throughout, I monitored security and diagnosed erratic behavior both wired and wireless across the network.
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Network Engineer, Staff Scientist, Weather ObserverMount Washington Observatory Oct 2005 - Jun 2008UsMy perfect job? Maybe...maybe. But it didn't pay well, I bounced around on grant funding and I needed to expand professionally. Still, I lived on the highest mountain in the northeastern US. Listen to all these other great parts:I upgraded the bandwidth to the summit facility to 60 times faster than spec'd and implemented by an expensive consultant. We're talking a 17-mile 5.8GHz radio link with equipment I landed for free. I secured this corporate sponsorship deal from a company that made the best equipment for our situation. I researched everything on the market. The partnership also included a 3-year support contract and radios ($20,000 in total) for numerous remote monitoring sites.I designed this network—"mesonet" in the lingo—of 30+ remote weather stations spanning the White Mountains, most of them in extremely harsh conditions. I mapped every possible link to every place we could realistically put instrumentation. I researched and purchased everything: solar panels, charge controllers, monster 200 amp-hour sealed deep cycle batteries, NEMA enclosures, LMR cable, lightning protection, low power switches capable of 40 below, etc. I hiked antenna up mountains to estimate link strength, sledded at night to repair a site and skied a pack full of tools for an upgrade. I collaborated with ski areas, the US Forest Service and Verizon for site permission.On the software side, I wrote logger programs for data collection and a web interface for monitoring power capacity at the solar sites. I overhauled a feeble database and created a web front-end to integrate current data with 75 years of historical climate record. (The best JavaScript I'd ever written at that point.)For most of this, I was also a weather observer. I'd go outside every hour for 12 hours recording and reporting the conditions and deicing the instrumentation (with a crowbar). I wrote forecasts and broadcast them on NPR. I helped run the facility, managed overnight trips and shoveled a lot. -
Hutmaster/Hut CrooAppalachian Mountain Club Aug 2002 - Oct 2005Boston, Massachusetts, UsMany people have said to me, "I wish I'd done this out of college!" Yup, I knew it was a good plan.I lived in five backcountry huts in the White Mountains in close quarters with varying crews of 3-10 or on my own as a caretaker. 100+ hikers would stay overnight and we'd cook meals, pack in food, carry out trash and take care of the place. Search and rescue was common. So were stunning views and fresh air. I managed the crew for three seasons, solo caretook for two seasons and worked on crews for two others. -
Retail Sales AssociateEastern Mountain Sports Oct 2004 - May 2005Meriden, Ct, UsI left work at work and it was a nice feeling. I was satisfied by this job. Interactions with customers were often great. I still remember selling a tent to a motorcycle camper, helping a thru-hiker pick the right boots and explaining snowshoes to new winter walkers. My technogeek interest in performance and cool features easily transferred into gear—lightweight fabrics, tiny stoves, super bright LEDs. Gear is fun stuff. Wearing it into the ground is pretty fun too. Yes this was a standard customer service job, but it was good enough to do twice. I worked at two stores, North Conway in 2005 and Concord in 2003. -
User Services Consultant (Student)Skidmore College Sep 1998 - May 2002Saratoga Springs, Ny, UsI was the first student Skidmore ever hired into the telecom department. Right away I continued what I'd done in high-school—network and hardware support. I could get through a Dell support rep to an Airborne Express shipping label for a replacement part in no time. Back when every campus in America was freaking out about Napster, I was watching Fluke Network Inspector and HP OpenView for the port-by-port highest bandwidth users.In later years, I switched into user services to help professors with software and tell students that if their only copy was on floppy disk they'd be sorry. I redesigned the department's website using Dreamweaver templates and wrote reference documentation for server access setup and network troubleshooting.
Jon Cotton Education Details
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Skidmore CollegeComputer Science & Asian Studies -
National Outdoor Leadership School
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Proctor Academy
Frequently Asked Questions about Jon Cotton
What company does Jon Cotton work for?
Jon Cotton works for Agerpoint
What is Jon Cotton's role at the current company?
Jon Cotton's current role is Infrastructure Software Engineer.
What is Jon Cotton's email address?
Jon Cotton's email address is jc****@****zen.org
What is Jon Cotton's direct phone number?
Jon Cotton's direct phone number is +141559*****
What schools did Jon Cotton attend?
Jon Cotton attended Skidmore College, National Outdoor Leadership School, Proctor Academy.
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