About Me

I am an experienced software, devops, and reliability engineer who is passionate about building sustainable solutions. I have significant experience in creating CI/CD tools and patterns. I love to learn new things and stretch my intellectual ability. I enjoy helping others to learn and grow and believe that enabling personal growth is one of the best ways to build a strong team.

My primary hobbies include: spending time with family (wife and 3 kids), training my dog, hiking, mountain biking, playing guitar, running, and snowboarding. I am very easy going. I love to listen to other’s opinions and always try to consider others throughout my work responsibilities. I will step up and make decisions where needed, but always do so as transparently as possible. I can get things done fast when needed, but prefer to do things the right way. I believe that doing things the right way leads to increased productivity through decreased rate of maintenance and increased clarity.

Experience

Fidelity: Director, Site Reliability Engineering
11/2023 - Present

Still figuring out what I’m doing here. I’ll report back in a few months.

NICE CXone: Principal DevOps Engineer
09/2020 - 11/2023

I am the lead engineer on my team of 14 engineers and I have unofficially worn the manager hat for the last 2 years while we have not had a manager (recently got one!). My team is responsible for building and sustaining multi-tenant solutions to enable our internal developer’s to build, deploy, and operate their applications. My main responsibilities include:

Maintaining and improving our AWS EKS platform accounts for a large portion of the work done by my team. This internal multi-tenant platform as a service is hosting all microservice workloads created by our R&D department. My team maintains the clusters, the multi-tenant ingress solution, many shared components within the clusters (Karpenter, Prometheus, Istio, AWS Load Balancer Controller, etc), and CD process and tooling for deploying workloads. The project to provision this infrastructure started in December 2020. All of the infrastructure (VPC, EKS, Node Groups, ALBs, S3, Route53, WAF) is provisioned using Terraform within GitHub Actions workflows. All of the workloads are provisioned using Helm charts or Kustomize overlays synced by ArgoCD. We follow a strict GitOps approach for deploying all workloads. I was the only engineer assigned to build this infrastructure when the project started. There are now 14 engineers supporting this project. Before this infrastructure, R&D engineers were required to create their own hosting infrastructure unique per each workload. I have been influential in helping the R&D organization to standardize on a common way of deploying workloads. This has been hugely beneficial for reducing the effort to get new microservices deployed and for standardizing our operational behavior and tooling.

Another notable project that I’ve worked on is the creation of a GitHub App written in Go which we call code-review-bot. This application attaches status checks to GitHub Pull Requests (PRs) which are used to block or allow merging the PR based upon a custom code ownership schema which we designed. This has allowed us to significantly reduce the number of notifications which people receive from GitHub. This has also allowed us to ensure the correct people are reviewing PRs in our large multi-tenant monorepo.

NICE CXone: Senior Software Engineer
03/2019 - 09/2020

I worked on the development of various Go microservices designed to increase scalability of monolithic applications through thoughtfully breaking out features. The services which we built are stateless and integrate with AWS DynamoDB, SQS, and Kinesis for state management. I was an influential member of the team in making technology decisions and standards for future development such as Kubernetes, Go, gRPC, Stateless design pattern. I was the primary developer of our reusable CI/CD workflows which saved countless hours of developer time. I was the primary developer of our Kubernetes platform, hosted on AWS EKS.

NICE CXone: Senior Software Engineer
09/2018 - 03/2019

I worked on the development of a NICE CXone core microservice written in Scala with Akka. While on this team it was identified that there was a large gap in the monitoring of the health of this core microservice. This microservice was deployed in a way that differed greatly from other solutions in the past. Due to these differences our typical monitoring tools would not suffice. I wrote a small service which sends simulated events through the microservice on a recurring interval to provide metrics on how the simulated events are being processed. This monitoring service still serves today as the primary method of health visibility for the Scala microservice and has served as a pattern of best practice for other developers writing microservices.

NICE CXone: Senior Software Engineer
12/2015 - 09/2018

I created and maintained applications (primarily in C# and Go) that are responsible for monitoring the stability of the NICE CXone platform. If an internal service required monitoring that was not possible with one of our existing solutions then I would build a custom solution. I also managed and configured our BMC TrueSight, Prometheus, and Grafana monitoring tools. I developed methods of delivering production telemetry that are still heavily depended on. I gained a strong knowledge of what it takes to operate production services and how to effectively produce automated actions or alerts based upon problematic application behaviors.

AdvancedMD: Software Engineer
06/2015 - 12/2015

I worked on a team whose primary responsibility was to build integrations and new features on the NetSuite platform. We used primarily vanilla javascript for most of our projects.

Calldrip: Full Stack Web Developer
02/2014 - 06/2015

Full stack developer. Designed, maintained, and created all web pages (PHP, HTML, CSS/Twitter Bootstrap, Javascript/jQuery) and the database (mySQL) hosted on Google Cloud Computing. When I joined this company their website was hosted on servers in a private data center and deployed by manually copying files into the servers. I was influential in driving a migration to GCP infrastructure with our software deployed via a custom automated process triggered by Git commits.

Technical Experience

Copy To Read - Text to Speech

This is an Android app which I developed as a fun side project. The basic functionality of the app is to convert copied text into audible speech (text to speech). This app has 100,000+ downloads spread across many countries. I’ve enjoyed countless interactions with users of the app over the years.

Programming Languages

Go: I started working professionally with Go in 2017. I enjoy the simplistic syntax and simple SDLC that Go supports. When starting a new project this is my go-to language. My most recent Go project was to create a GitHub App hosted in Kubernetes which assigns and enforces code reviewers to GitHub Pull Requests. This project has greatly reduced undesired GitHub notifications to users and the time it takes to get a Pull Request reviewed and merged.

terraform: I’ve been working professionally with terraform for about 5 years to provision primarily AWS resources. I’ve worked with various terraform providers and modules over the years and constructed many of my own modules. My current team provisions all of our AWS resources using a GitOps workflow built around Terraform.

C#: I started working professionally with C# in 2015. I have developed many applications used for monitoring the health of other applications via Windows Performance Counters, HTTP APIs, SOAP APIs, gRPC APIs, and various other methods which aren’t supported by our vendor supplied monitoring tools.

Java: I started working with Java during College in 2013. My primary experience with Java has been to create my Copy To Read Android app. Throughout my time at NICE CXone I’ve made some contributions to various Java projects.

Basic knowledge of Python, YAML (Kubernetes!), Helm, Groovy, Javascript, Typescript, Spanish

Education

B.S., Computer Science Weber State University
Ogden, Utah (Graduated May 2015)