David Schoen Email & Phone Number

Strangways, Vic, Au

Remote

Managing a split role between transitioning back to the application team, SRE duties and hand over of the platform, I have moved back to the application team to fill out a gap in backend capabilities. This is a small team managing an ancient, large and complex code base - the problems to solve are challenging and diverse as we “strangle the monolith”.

Squiz started an SRE team of product and platform engineers on rotation between their regular work and SRE work. I participated effectively as a part time SRE, gaining a base understanding of how the SRE approach to monitoring means focusing on what the customer cares about, not what might “knock the system offline”.

Remote

I became the de facto Lead Engineer for the Squiz Matrix product team. I was offered the role, but remained acting. With my second child on the way and having never previously been in a high functioning team (let alone leading one) it was not the right time to accept.Highlights • Reduced time to release from weeks to hours • Shared siloed knowledge amongst whole team • Introduced pull request code reviews • Introduced code guidelines • Improved test practices • Provided lower complexity (Docker) local development environments • Improved test practices • Managed a complex merge of the tests and production repositories allowing for tests to merge atomically with code under test • Getting tests running on every commit • Improved CI performance - approximately 30 hours down to 30 minutes • Introduced unit (as opposed to feature and E2E) tests • Facilitated the first major changes to the architecture of Matrix in 15 years • Aided transition to Agile in the form of Kanban • On boarded new team members • Regular collaboration with most business areas • Modernised a very old tech stack • Assisted with recruitment and selection of new team members (including the Engineering Manager who filled this role)

Remote

I transitioned on to the Squiz Matrix product team. This was my first role on a development team where the team worked on the same code base. Prior to this I did a lot of software development, but rarely with someone else working on the same code base as me.

Remote

I moved from Melbourne to North Central Victoria in 2014. My manager was supportive of transitioning my role to working remotely. Squiz at the time did not have regular work from home or remote staff so this was an experiment for myself and a gamble that paid off for Squiz.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Recognising the value of the development I was doing geographically separate to the Squiz Labs office (at the time, Squiz’s development team) a new role was created to allow me to focus on software development for projects that didn’t fit into Labs.Although this was a new role name, I mostly just added to my existing duties.Highlights • Built Squiz Refresh, an automation tool for upgrades to support reliably reproducible upgrades between test/production environments and allowing sufficient customisation when required for Squiz’s bespoke Matrix instances • Numerous client specific small development projects

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

I joined Squiz in a Systems Administrator role because it allowed me to move from Canberra to Melbourne. My personal goal was to introduce the content migration tooling and general automation practices I’d developed at Immigration and move on after two or so years. My goal was eventually met, albeit with more collaboration and realistic timelines than I had envisioned.In my capacity as Systems Administrator I took on design, build and maintenance of many of the more complicated client hosted installations of Squiz Matrix. These were typically bespoke clusters running Solaris or RHEL with either a Squiz managed HA PostgreSQL or DBA managed Oracle RAC. There were often 100s of stakeholders involved for larger clients.When time permitted I worked on improving the migration tooling started at Immigration into Squiz Transform and Squiz Mirror. I also started scripting upgrades to ensure steps were reproducible between UAT and production upgrades.Highlights • Managed complex, bespoke clusters for large clients • Assisted with recruitment, selection and training of new Systems Administrators • Trained client System Administrators • Worked closely with sales, including presenting technical aspects of our solutions to client boards • Found a lot of critical security issues and helped resolve them • Developed long lived migration tooling and some client specific plugins • Became a central point with which to raise any sufficiently challenging issue

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

I started with the task of testing content migration scripting Squiz was building for Immigration, but took over the development of the scripts themselves and automating the bulk of many large (up to 17k page) content sites into Squiz Matrix. This scripting eventually became Squiz Transform, a more generic framework for crawling web sites, deduplicating content, stripping designs and importing content into Squiz Matrix.I worked at most layers, with a range of web and supporting (e.g Nagios, Puppet, Subversion) technologies, including Panoptic which became Squiz’s search engine Funnelback. From integration of existing software, through to design, architecture, build and testing on new projects. Kernel issues right up to front end JavaScript.Highlights • Forking Squiz Matrix to add static publishing to support the scalability required on the public facing websites • Engineering a repository structure and related processes to support integrating upstream changes of Squiz Matrix into our forked version reliably • Multiple software and hardware upgrades of server clusters • Developing Matrix to Matrix migration tooling (became Squiz Mirror) • Automate the build of multiple development, testing, training, staging and production environments • Design and build of the Visa Wizard, which received the Australia Day 2009 Secretary’s Citation award • Web analytics to support data driven decision making about site changes • Secondment on to team maintaining SAP when they were having load balancing issues resulting in being unable to pay approximately 13k staff

Palmerston, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

I was hired for system administration of a fairly conventional Microsoft teachers network and a Terminal Services students network supporting roughly 450 students.At around this time multimedia rich educational applications were taking off and a Terminal Services network (where all frames are sent over the network) just wasn’t going to perform. The school was leasing the Terminal Services equipment on a 7 year agreement with minimal budget to purchase new equipment. I was able to source equipment from a few large organisations that were cycling out 2-3 year old machines that with carefully tuned Windows installations were much more capable than a Terminal Services solution. With careful application of automation (e.g machine imaging) I was able replace around 200 thin terminals with desktop machines that could be centrally maintained and were much more capable for the school's needs.The School Board signed a letter of thanks, and I quote - “thank you for the outstanding work you did on replacing our total IT Infrastructure this year ... The successful implementation of the new equipment was completed with minimal disruption to any classes which was greatly appreciated by all the Teachers ... you delivered an IT Project on time and within budget!!”.Highlights • Automated so much of my job that a few interested primary school children were able to learn to do most of my remaining job • Facilitate early trails of interactive whiteboards • Teaching assistance • Professional Assault Response Training • Migrating beloved interactive stories, that the librarian had authored, from a static website into Squiz Matrix