Personal details

Elbert L. - Remote

Elbert L.

Timezone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) (UTC-7)

Summary

I'm not only looking for my next big challenge, but also the next little ones. I pride myself on quality of work - getting the job done as expected and on time.

I started out with SCO Unix and Windows 3.1, but I have since moved from them onto the various linux flavors back before it had matured as an operating system (slackware, mandrake) and even a little os/2! Nowadays I spend most of my time in Ubuntu. Once a hater of vi, now a lover of vim, I was fortunate enough to be a student at UC Berkeley at the dawn of the World Wide Web, back when the only available browser was Chameleon. Netscape Navigator didn't even exist yet!

Fast forward in time, and on a deep level, we are still faced with the problem of too many things to do, too little time. I love building automation solutions. A few of my roles have been as the only SRE/Devops engineer at early stage startups, and it would have been impossible to do my job, never mind maintain my sanity, if I had not built tools and automation for as many aspects of my job as possible.

Everybody needs it, and I love providing it.

Work Experience

Sr Software Engineer
Razer | Jan 2017 - Feb 2019
Python
Android
Git
Linux
Jenkins
Android Studio
Monitoring
Android SDK
Amazon Alexa
Joining via acquisition, I was the architect and implementor of the migration process to determine what technologies to combine or migrate and to where. It was a good opportunity to lay out the future of the development technology stack for the BU. Once that process was finished and handed off, I still maintained ownership over source code management, participated in devops standups and initiatives, and joined an innovation team to explore more product-focused initiatives. Duties there included building prototypes and delivering the results of our R&D efforts through presentations to the key stakeholders. In my various roles, I interfaced directly with senior management, the development team at large, and the product and project management teams.
Scotty (Staff SRE)
Nextbit | Apr 2013 - Dec 2016
Android
Git
Nginx
Jenkins
Automation
Gradle
Monitoring
Nagios
I was the first SRE/DevOps hire. When I joined the organization there was literally only one EC2 instance in AWS, so I focused on aspects of the business other than ops until we needed a proper infrastructure buildout. - I ported our product into the android emulator. This was not simply a matter of launching an apk through the emulator. The company modified the AOSP code to incorporate deep OS enhancements, so thte goldfish image for the android emulator itself needed to be updated with our changes. - I built the entirety of the dev, staging, and production clusters, including monitoring and alerting, automatoin, and data security. - I enforced best practices and mentored junior staff. - I wore my IT hat when necessary: user devices, office peripherals, server room, cabling.

Personal Projects

Making Amazon ASG play nicely with Nagios
2014
Python
YAML
Monitoring
Nagios
This was a custom solution to enable a Nagios server to be updated whenever a node was added to or removed from an AWS auto-scaling group. Of critical importance was that this needed to be completely automated and be easily auditable by admins as demanded.
"One-button" AWS cluster deployment through boto and python
2015
Python
This was a CLI tool that was created to easily launch full serving clusters (VPC, EC2, ELB, SQS, RDS, SG, IAM) via a single command-line. It was built off of Boto. Among its features was supported mix-and match of generalized components and a reviewable history.