| Summary: | I offer an extensive background in all things Unix, enthusiasm to learn new technologies, a thorough Computer Science background, as well as high quality standards; I can implement scalable and reliable tools, design architectures and APIs, create proof-of-concept prototypes or intuitively and quickly analyze existing architectures both for what works and what doesn't; I have experience in small scale deployments and academia as well as in enormous high-availability infrastructures serving millions of users; I'm used to distributed collaboration in an open source model and telecommuting; I enjoy teaching/mentoring, offer strong interpersonal and communications skills, a curious and open mind and very strong work ethics. |
| Current interests and ambitions |
I'm currently primarily interested in Secure and Scalable Infrastructure
Systems Architecture.
If your company is currently growing at a rapid pace, I will be
able to help you build scalable long term solutions. Areas of
particular interest: IPv6, DNSSEC, Virtualization and Cloud
Computing, Package Management, Software Deployment. Having a
long term impact and building something that lasts are as
important to me as my own professional growth, academic
development and community outreach.
At the moment I'm working on a textbook for my class Aspects of System Administration, to be published hopefully in time for the Spring 2013 semester by Wiley & Sons. Working title: ``An Introduction to Design for Professional System Administration'' Specialties: Large scale System Administration and Infrastructure Architecture; conceptual integrity; scalable infrastructure tools; all things unix; automation of any thinkable task; most of what has become known as "DevOps" lately. Technical Expertise: NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, RHEL... any unix-based OS; AWS/EC2; C, Perl, Python, PHP, Shell... ready to pick up any new language; REST, intuitive grasp of API requirements |
| LinkedIn Profile Careers 2.0 profile |
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| Selected Publications/Talks: |
"Of Headless User Accounts and Restricted Shells",
;login, The USENIX Magazine, December 2011
"L3DSR -- Overcoming Layer 2 Limitations of Direct Server Return Load Balancing", NANOG 51, January 2011 "Teaching System Administration in the Cloud ", ;login, The USENIX Magazine, October 2010 "Building Better Tools", NYCBug, [audio], June 2009 "DST '07 @ Yahoo!", BayLISA [video], May 2007 "Useless Use of *", SCALE5x, February 2007 "Pondering Live CDs", BSDCan 2006, May 2006, PDF [ slides] |
| Experience: |
SquarespaceNew York, NY January 2012 - present Senior Infrastructure Architect Yahoo! Inc.Sunnyvale, CA May 2011 - December 2011 Principal Paranoid Member of Yahoo!'s small central security team in charge of all aspects of product-, infrastructure-, network- and all other security related issues. My main focus there is currently on secure system architecture, conceptual integrity, vulnerability assessment and analysis, intrusion detection, as well as review of existing or new projects with particular focus on scalability and (data and service) integrity. I routinely (try not to) break things, fix them and implement and design long term solutions. And I worry. Yahoo! Inc.Sunnyvale, CA May 2007 - April 2011 System Architect I create secure and scalable infrastructure solutions, ranging from configuration management over centralized and decentralized syslog deployments to massive host scanning, IPv6 implementation and strategy and everything in between, focussing on quality, correctness and the long term impact. The results are used to service over half a billion people every month.
Yahoo! Inc.Sunnyvale, CA September 2006 - May 2007 Senior System Administrator Extended and maintained configuration management system deployed on nearly 100K hosts; wrote rapid deployment system to reduce inventory-to-ready-to-serve turnaround time; wrote miscellaneous tools to automate regular workflow and processes; instituted best software engineering practices. STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYHoboken, NJ Summer 2003 - May 2006, September 2008 - present Adjunct Professor of Computer Science Teaching Graduate level class `` Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment'', based on the well-known book by W. Richard Stevens, covering such topics as the user/kernel interface, fundamental concepts of UNIX, user authentication, basic and advanced I/O, fileystem, signals, process relationships, and interprocess communication. This class has now been added as a requirement to the Master's degree in Computer Science. Developed from scratch and am currently teaching graduate level class ``Aspects of System Administration'', covering topics such as hardware configuration, operating system installation, shell programming, security policies, backup deployment and disaster recovery, network design, software installation and maintenance, operating system tuning. (This class played an important role in the certification of Stevens's Computer Science Department as an NSA Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education; it is now part of the Master's degree requirements.) In this class, I pioneered the use of Amazon EC2/AWS cloud services for teaching system administration. STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYHoboken, NJ September 2001 - July 2006 System Administrator Administration of the Imperatore School of Sciences and Arts Scientific Computing resources (infrastructure and desktops), supporting some 3000 users (students, professors, staff alike) and their varying software needs. ZENTROPY PARTNERSNew York, NY June 2000 - September 2000 Senior Programmer SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUMNew York, NY September 1999 - September 2001 Webmaster |
| Technical Skills: | I'm always willing and able to quickly understand and learn other
programming languages, software skills, protocols etc.
based on solid Computer Science background, years of
work experience and general enthusiasm and personal
interest in the area.OS/Architectures:NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux (RHEL and various other distributions), IRIX, MacOS X, Solaris; x86, sparc, mips, PowerPC, amd64 Virtualization:Xen, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Software:Completely fluent in all common unix userland tools including shell-scripting (sh, csh, ksh, sed, awk, regular expressions etc.), cvs, ssh, etc.; Programming Languages:C, Perl, shell, Java, PHP, Python, C++, SQL, some Tcl/Tk Protocols, Services and Standards:TCP/IP, UDP, SNMP, HTTP, SMTP, NIS/YP, NFS, FTP, CVS, SVN Solid understanding of SUSv3 Familiarity with routing and switching (Cisco, Extreme hardware). Markup LanguagesLaTeX, HTML, some XML, some *roff Spoken Languages:English (fluent), German (native), bits an pieces of Spanish and French |
| Education: | CISCO SYSTEMSCisco Certified Network Associate / CCNA (2005) STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYHoboken, NJ Master of Science in Computer Science (2004) STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYHoboken, NJ B.S in Computer Science (2001) PHILIPS-UNIVERSITÄT MARBURGMarburg, Germany M.A. studies in Contemporary German Literature and American Studies (1996-1998) |
| Other: |
Developed Open Source Software available at http://www.netmeister.org and GitHub Joined the The NetBSD Project as a developer in January 2002:
Member of ACM and SIGOPS. Member of EFF. Member of USENIX and SAGE. (USENIX Campus Liaison 2005 - 2006.) |