Aaron Brady
24 Old School Drive
Stafford
ST16 1RL
aaron@iweb.co.uk

Profile

I am a multi-skilled developer and operations person who believes that a good knowledge of software development is usable in any language. I have management experience, from both software project and business points of view and possess first class analytical, problem solving and people skills. I can explain technical things to less technical people.

I have knowledge of computing from low-level bit-moving to functional abstractions. (I would rather be at the "high" end of that scale, but don't mind getting my hands dirty in a debugger).

Meta-skills:

• Dynamic Languages (Lisp, Smalltalk, Scheme)
• Web Architecture (REST, HTTP/web server stack)
• Object Oriented Design
• Technical Writing / English Skills
• System Administration / Operations
• Scaling Web Applications
• Automation of Operations

Languages:

• Python (13 years, used commercially, current)
• PHP (15 years, used commercially, 5.3-era)
• Java (5 years, used commercially, 1.4-era)
• C (5 years, limited commercial use, current)

I can work in several more languages, but couldn't create significant applications from scratch, including: Ruby, Go, TCL, Perl, Javascript and CoffeeScript.

Major Technologies:

• Puppet (3 years, used commercially, current)
• Ansible (2 years, used commercially, current)
• Git (5 years, used commercially, current)
• MySQL (15 years, used commercially, current)
• TCP/IP Routing (BGP, OSPF) (7 years, used commercially, current)
• Linux (17 years, heavy commercial use, current)

Employment:

Interactive Web Solutions Limited, March 2005 - date: Joined as a software developer and transitioned to operations around 2008. Still writing software within operations.

Crestnorth and Crestsource Limited, June 2000 - March 2005: Umbrella for consulting and contracting work.

Significant Experience:

From 2008 to date, I have been Technical Development Manager and responsible for the operation of all of the production servers, along with two other administrators in my department. I've spent more than a third of this time on-call for out-of-hours issues.

This period included my involvement in a large scale push towards automation using Puppet and a CMDB, as well as the successful launch of a new file sharing service, mostly written in Python (iWeb FTP) and a new hosting platform to ensure the company's steady growth beyond the current ~400 hosts.

At various points I have continued to do development directly for customers, including much of the original frontend of the National STEM Centre eLibrary.

From 2005 until 2008, I developed software for iWeb's customers, largely in PHP5. This included large portions of the frontend and warehouse systems of the MyMemory.co.uk and BuyAssociation.co.uk web sites and several smaller applications. All work was with a variable sized team made up of programmers, designers and managers, dealing with customers directly. I also did various system administration tasks before there was officially an operations role.

From 2000 until 2005, I consulted on or wrote under contract web-based applications written in PHP, Python and Java, speaking to MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Sybase. These projects were largely for the travel and financial services training sector. I performed system administration as part of this work, including administration for the Irish Independent On-line.

Open Source:

I have contributed to various Open Source projects in the last decade. Recent contributions are listed on my GitHub page. Some highlights include:

• Small changes to Icinga and Collectd monitoring daemons. (In C)
• AES support for the Python NSCA (Nagios Passive Check) library. (Python)
• Refactoring in Ansible core. (Python)
• Adding X-Forwarded-For and shotgun reloading to the Scalable TCP Unwrapping Daemon. (In C)
• Adding "build from image" support to Hashicorp's Packer. (In Go)
• (For iWeb)
  • Initial work on the mcollective-python library. (Python)
  • A Flask wrapper for displaying Collectd data. (Python)
  • A dynamic monitoring status board in Flask, with notification support. (Python)
  • A open-source ticketing system heavily used at iWeb. (Python)

Other Activities:

As an member of the Python Community, I blog about Python and software development issues.

I presented a talk, "Real Time Monitoring at Scale" at the 2013 FLOSS UK Spring Conference, "Python for Configuration Management" at the 2013 PyCon UK Python Conference and shorter talks at Staffordshire University and Staffordshire Web Meet-up about Operations work, Design Patterns, SOLID Principles and Web Security.

Education:

Attended Dublin City University to study "Computer Applications", but left during my first year to work in industry.