I manage the Platform Services team inside of F5's Data Fabric & Observability group (formerly known as App Infrastructure Protection, by way of Threat Stack's acquisition). We collect, process, and store all kinds of data, and help make it ridiculously easy to apply compute to that data. In March 2024, my role was expanded to include the F5 Distributed Cloud Logging, Monitoring, and Alerting infrastructure, and the log shipping functionality in the Distributed Cloud product.My team's remit includes running a data ingestion pipeline that takes OpenTelemetry data and stores it in a structured data lake, creating patterns to easily deploy services like Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Clickhouse in the cloud and in datacenters - and actually handling the operations for those platforms as well.

I manage a team of people who create the patterns and tooling that are used to secure, operate, and deliver the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform. This involves many hats - some days I'm working directly with the code that provisions the infrastructure, other days i'm managing people and working across teams, and some days I'm working with spreadsheets that correlate cloud spend to feature cost and negotiating commercial terms with cloud providers.

In November 2018 Threat Stack created the Platform Security Group with a mission focusing on production environments. I lead that team. We're a group of application security and security operations people working across the organization to make the secure way the easy way. Our work includes maintaining authentication systems, providing secure coding expertise, building out AWS security best practices, and helping provide security context and information company-wide.I still write a bit of security tooling (like Trash Taxi) and continue to maintain/update some of the other open-source golang tools I wrote on Threat Stack's GitHub repo (check out the golang projects at https://github.com/threatstack)

I keep the bits flowing safely and securely through Threat Stack's platform.As the first infrastructure security engineer at Threat Stack I primarily work with engineering, but I also help folks at all levels across the whole organization on anything security related. This includes technical work like building security tooling, managing our internal security alerting and monitoring systems, thinking up what we should be alerted on, and mentoring junior ops engineering staff in the organization.Additionally, I distribute security knowledge throughout the organization. This ranges in complexity: from "what password manager should I use?" and "does this email seem weird to you?" to helping auditors understand our organizational controls and discussing/assessing risk as it relates to the business.Large projects include deploying LDAP and SSO, assisting on a SOC2 assessment, working towards short term credentials using Vault, re-building/deploying the Threat Stack backend from scratch, and moving authentication secrets to YubiKeys.

In Lincoln's Secure Resilient Systems and Technologies group, I helped researchers understand cloud computing, and contribute to novel systems for giving control and visibility back to the consumers of cloud services. At that time, that meant looking at plans for upcoming demonstrations, helping researchers figure out what to log/monitor and help with deployment so that they can have successful tech demonstrations. Part of my role involved educating other internal organizations about these decisions as well.In addition to that, I maintained our internal cloud resource running Joyent's SmartDataCenter platform. We had deployed this platform to help researchers securely use self-service and API-driven resources.I built out a tool named Spyglass, which helps monitor organization sysadmins. You can hear more about that in the talk video linked below (https://vimeo.com/159704018). The spyglass repositories are available at https://github.com/mit-ll.

The Lincoln Laboratory Computer Aided Design (LLCAD) network supported FPGA, IC, PCB, RF and other EDA/scientific applications on a Linux platform. I worked with the LLCAD network as a systems administrator co-op student from 2007-2009, then full-time from 2009-2014.As an infrastructure person for LLCAD I evaluated infrastructural hardware/software ideas and made recommendations accordingly. I assisted in the preparation of yearly budget requests, then worked through the purchasing process, then set up what we bought. Automation is important, so I took what was a manual system install process and replaced it with some custom Perl I wrote to set up a PXE boot environment. Eventually this was replaced with Foreman for provisioning and Puppet for declarative system state, both still in use years later.One responsibility of the LLCAD network was to maintain a circuit board parts library. An old version of the parts request application was unsupported, so I created a new version of the application using PHP. To support long term maintainability, I ended up rewriting it using the Ruby on Rails framework which is still in use (and has much happier users) today.I also contributed to research efforts within the Advanced Lasercomm Systems and Operations group, including setting up a telemetry processing network for MIT's Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration, one of the first freespace optical links between the Earth and a satellite orbiting the Moon. I also selected security equipment and helped with network design for the group's embedded systems projects.

I maintained IT operations for businesses, municipalities and home users near Plymouth, MA.Most of my work was managing the IT needs for the Town of Halifax, Massachusetts. I had a technology operations budget of about $35k, and would work on making the most of that budget along with helping employees with their desktops, figuring out technology purchases, etc. Other work included large-event logistics planning for the photography unit of a large regional newspaper, and helping a smaller tax preparation firm figure out how to best support remote workers.

I maintained a multi-server environment for a school of 200 students and 30 faculty and staff. I would also help on the desktop side as well - the school had about 100 Windows and Macintosh computers around the facility.A big part of my role involved helping faculty and staff better understand technology used in the classroom with afternoon sessions and tutorials. On the server administration side, I made sure that backups of important school data were occurring regularly, that restores worked, and set up group policy for the Windows machines that the school had just purchased.It wasn't uncommon to assist other technicians with networking and architecture problems. Before starting at Dennett, I migrated the Silver Lake Regional School District’s iPlanet-based email and web server to a FreeBSD-based server running qmail, which the school district used for about 8 years.