Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 | kirk (at) icapsolutions.com
Here’s a little insight as to what I’m capable of doing, resumes seem to get lost in translation. Experience, with a bit of personality and professional relationships is where you will find someone like me …
I have over 30 years experience as a DevOps System Engineer, Software Development, Database Development and Administration, as well as a Unix System Administrator. My biggest accomplishment: I solely conceived, developed, and launched an online email marketing service back in the early 2000’s. There was a tremendous need for sending bulk commercial and corporate marketing material to customers, and since I was/am an email (MTA) expert, it seemed reasonable to create one from scratch. It’s brief history is actually a long story, and unfortunately it fizzled out after a few short years. The ultimate demise of my product was the likes of ConstantContact, whom of course had investors and steamrolled the competition because of it. I thought at the time to find investors of my own, roll up the sleeves and go to battle. I had several close friends who offered some of the funding, but at the time I was starting a family and already had my first child with another one on the way. It seemed too risky at the time with everything else going on in my life so I just let it roll organically. It did managed to attract several clients, mostly small, made at one point a few thousand per month just enough to support the cost of the colo facility and equipment. Eventually, business went to the heavy hitting competitors and the plug had to be pulled.
The model I developed was a fully functioning, scalable, self managing online email marketing service. The base configuration comprised of 4 servers:
server 1 – the web front end (Apache2, mod_perl2 API)
server 2 – the database (MySql – MariaDB)
server 3 – the primary mail server (qmail – customized outbound MTA)
server 4 – bounce processor and image server (good ol Linux and Perl)
The scalability comes with server 3, those qmail servers can be added to the mix as the custom install allows for multi node, multi domain and distribution options based on traffic flow.
I still have it, it lives on a single server in my office and is online, limited of course because I cant have anyone sign up and send 3 million emails … that wouldn’t be good. I think the signup process and client pages are in fact accessible, it even send out mailers but I believe I have it stop at 10 or 20, something like that anyway.
I haven’t worked on it for some time now, the front end is a bit rough and is – in my view – still in the prototype phase. Just recently my son who takes an art class is making use of his newly acquired skills and is adding some fun looking graphics and learning a bit about web pages, templates, etc. He’s already posted up his first image on the home page which I thought was cool, and he’s making a few others which will soon be added header and several other pages. Eventually all the images will be replaced with his work, I’m just letting him run with it.
My days of coding are slowly fading away and being replaced by the world of DevOps. I’m currently working for TwineData as the DevOps System Administrator, Its an Ad tech company which compiles mobile data, provides publishers and marketers with data monetization, insights, and effective marketing. My responsibilities stretch laterally, everything from AWS budget to writing Lambda functions. I’ve redesigned a data pipeline to reduce cost and improve performance, implemented a VPN and designed an multi layered VPC with peering connections, endpoints, adjusting routing tables and subnets, I provide the glue between services and products. My job is really to support everyone in the company, to make sure the engineers have what they need to do their job, interact with business development to satisfy requirements, manage the AWS budget, monitor/manage/maintain the engine and keep everything running smoothly.
Prior to that, I worked with an online job board called SalesJobs.com, an overly convoluted and complicated system. It had, when I first came on board, over 20+ servers all performing independently and out of sync. Over the years I’ve managed to consolidate all of that down to just a few larger more robust servers. Most recently I’ve implemented and deployed the service into the AWS cloud infrastructure taking advantage of the products and services (EC2, RDS, S3, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline) to rapidly and reliably build and deliver the product using DevOps practices, to remove the hardware dependencies.
Before that, I worked for TRW (now Northrop) for 15 years as an engineer in the communications department. I did everything from drafting plans for their underground wiring system, CADCAM design, project management, software development, system administration, etc. My employment their is an even longer story, very boring looking back, but I took away some great fundamentals which allowed me to go it on my own as an independent IT consultant.
I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, been around for a long time, I know a few things to say the least. I am not an expert in everything, if someone claims they’re are, I will show you a liar. I am however, fairly clever and can figure out most if not any problem situation. I think on my feet, I can certainly read/write code in many flavors, develop/manage/maintain system architectures in a standalone or cloud environment, and am proficient in most, if not all protocols.