My resume is available in pdf and txt. I am available for hire.

Alan D. Post

Objective

I consult in technical and management roles with a focus on accounting and IT automation.

Skills

Specialties: Virtualization with Xen. Operations and deployment with Ansible. Packaging, and build automation with Buildbot. Data screening and cleaning.
Programming languages: Python, SQL, C.
Operating systems: Linux (RedHat/CentOS & Debian/Ubuntu).

Professional Experience

Prgmr.com is an internet hosting company providing Linux & BSD virtual private servers to the general public since 2005.

• As of January 2020, hired a second employee for development and customer support.
• As of February 2019, make power and network infrastructure N+1 redundant while upgrading end-of-life hardware, in particular CPUs.
• In January 2018, Hired an employee for development and customer support.
• Renegotiate our data center contract to reduce cost while making more efficient use of space and power. Completed February 2018.
• Redesign the prgmr.com home page to be mobile friendly. Completed September 2017.

Linux Systems Administrator for hundreds of physical hosts used by the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) team.

• In May and June 2018, during a rolling operating system upgrade to our Network Filesystem (NFS) clients and servers, job submissions to the cluster began freezing intermittently, leading to cascading process seizure and eventual machine reboot. Bisected the kernel as part of restoring physical host reliability.
• In October 2018, using tcpdump and Wireshark, show that a TLS handshake error was caused by a change in Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) on a recently replaced switch, due to that packet exceeding all prior packets in size, leading to corrupt sequence numbers in the TCP stream. Network operations corrected the MTU on the switch and subsequent TLS connections completed successfully.

I ran technical operations for Electric Cloud, maintaining the systems that let us ship our build and test acceleration tool, Accelerator, and our release automation tool, Flow. These tools support end-to-end development and release automation.

• Surfaced build metrics and added analytics to Accelerator to help end-users debug their builds.
• Automated our toolchain and other third party software upgrades, rebuilding dependencies when a new upstream package was released.

VenueView.co provided analytics in physical space. Our managed wireless access point produced a visitor log for your location, and tracked unique and repeat visitors, group cohorts, and total site usage. We generated reports, invoices, and other analytics describing how your space was used.

• I lead a 5-person development team with a combination of embedded and cloud-based experience, designing a product for installation on-site that can be managed and interacted with remotely.
• Built a continuous integration system built on Buildbot to automate the development pipeline. This system is crucial for rapid prototyping, as a developer can deploy changes automatically to systems installed on-site.
• Designed and built wireless access points capable of local, real-time analytics while being cost-effective to deploy at scale.

Qforma modelled physician social networks, finding early adopters and other influential doctors to focus the advertising and sales efforts of our clients to where it will have the most impact.

• Created a template-based framework to standardize the data analysis underlying our iQMap and other products, defining an API for controlled customization of products.
• Extended and maintained a mini-language for structured parsing of data fields from client and vendor data files, providing hooks for per-file specialization in generic data munging routines.
• Wrote a drop-in multiprocessing framework to improve throughput of data analysis. This allowed us to rapidly resolve bottlenecks that emerged due to growth of our input data.

iniCom Networks, Inc. provided technology solutions to the legal industry, deploying and monitoring custom infrastructure to streamline client workflows.

• Designed and developed our extranet, which mediated all client interaction, including problem reporting, asset tracking, and billing. This system was responsible for our company's ability to efficiently satisfy client needs.
• Translated user requirements into work orders and a release schedule, coordinating a six-person team consisting of software developers and systems administrators through regular product releases.

Prediction Company runs a fully automated trading system that uses predictive models to buy and sell stock.

• Supported the research staff by loading, screening, and cleaning over 4 terabytes of third-party financial data. Our software system was extremely data-intensive; our data loaders often required hours or days of CPU time across multiple computers to process datasets.
• Managed an eight-person team of software developers and data analysts, responsible for maintaining and extending the financial data available to researchers used for running trading applications.

Open Source

Lobsters is a computing-focused community centered around link aggregation and discussion.

• Donate hosting, bandwidth, and systems administration. lobste.rs sees 12-15k unique IPs every weekday and has 6k active users as of July 2018.
• Moderate the IRC channel and website to help keep both topical, kind, and informative.

notqmail is a community-driven fork of qmail, beginning where netqmail left off: providing stable, compatible, small releases to which existing qmail users can safely update.

• Removed the build-time dependency on system uid and gid values, detecting them at runtime.
• Split install in to packaging and file ownership stages, as the uid and gid for system accounts in only available post install.

References

Available upon request.