9/2008 - Present

Systems Engineer

Getloaded is the second largest Internet based Freight Load Board in the United States, carrying an average of $50,000,000 of freight in day.

At Getloaded, I am the sole systems and network administrator, whilst I do perform daily administrative tasks, the main focus of my position is more on the Engineer side I perform all systems design and capacity planning, starting with the low level requirements gathering and escalating through quoting, budgeting and implementation.

Since starting work with Getloaded, I have bought down our annual running costs by over $250,000. Whilst increasing our running capacity by about 80%.

• Designing, planning and implementing a conversion to Vmware and Netapp.
• Reviewing charges by vendors and removing or replacing services which we didn't need or were overcharged for.
• Upgrading all operating systems to a single standard based Linux distribution.
• Planning a relocation of our entire data center to the West Coast.
• Planning and implementing a new firewall standard.
• Creating system policies for the entire IT department.
• Working with vendors and management on budgeting and project planning.
• Planning, budgeting and implementing a conversion to F5 load balancers.
• Planning and implementing a new backup standard.

9/2007 - 9/2008

Lead Systems and Network Engineer

Dominion Medical Management rapidly growing Medical Billing company with operations offices all along the East Coast.

Dominion Medical was an interesting experience for me, I had to deal with usual security considerations but also the extra requirement of all HIPPA guidelines. Although it was a large step down in terms of the number of systems I was maintaining compared to NEXCOM, the actual responsibility was a lot higher since the team was a lot smaller and I was the senior person.

The environment when I started at Dominion Medical was a mix of Redhat and CentOS on mismatched and unsupported hardware. One of the first projects I launched was standardization of the platform on a more recent and supported version of Linux, and a move to virtualize all hardware on Vmware ESX VI3. The end result of this project was the doubling of our billing capacity and reducing outages and down time.

In addition to managing the servers, I was responsible for maintaining and developing a custom coded perl application which dealt with billing messages from hospitals and vendors and our billing application. This was mostly based on the HL7 standards.

I spent a lot of time at Dominion Medical identifying failings in the infrastructure of the systems and network, and finding new and creative ways to fix these failings whilst staying within a low budget. By the time I left Dominion Medical everything was fully HIPPA and PCI compliant.

Some of the projects designed to improve the environment included:

• Planning and implementing a proper backup solution using bacula.
• Standardizing procedures.
• Planning and implementing a virtualized environment.
• Planning and implementing the move of our entire data center to a co-location facility.
• Configuring and maintaining an LDAP structure to support all satellite offices

2/2006 - 9/2007

UNIX Systems Engineer / Linux Systems Engineer

NEXCOM is the headquarters for the Navy Exchange System, which provides goods and services to Naval personnel and their families.

NEXCOM was a good learning environment to grow within my career working in a large scale UNIX network, our team was responsible for over 300 servers, and 16,000 direct and indirect users. In addition to usual systems tasks I was involved in larger tasks such as capacity planning, rebuilding and migrating servers and to a lesser extent a number of programming tasks.

Whilst I NEXCOM I was involved in the following projects:

• Configuring and installing AIX5L on a number of enterprise IBM servers.
• Writing software to allow customers to scan barcodes and receive product information.
• Liaising with outside vendors on implementing new production hardware and software.
• Improving security and building tools to administrate over 150 ISP UNIX servers.
• Planning and implementing the move of 150 ISP SCO servers and 3000 SCO cash registers to Redhat Linux.

5/2005 - 2/2006

Systems Administrator / PHP Developer

WebTeks is a web solutions provider responsible for the development of hundreds of websites. They have received numerous business awards within the Hampton Roads area.

When I started with WebTeks I bought skill sets with me that allowed the company to expand its business from just writing websites, and start offering security auditing services to companies, and offering non web application development, these are services they still offer today in large part due to the new ideas I helped them develop.

Some of the projects I was involved with included:

• Performing a Linux security audit for a Virginia based banking institution.
• Performing a security audit for the largest medical insurance provider in Virginia Beach.
• Performing an onsite infrastructure discovery for a multimillion-dollar company in New Mexico, and providing a recommendation for all areas of improvement.
• Performing network design and architecture design.
• Writing a helpdesk software package/Installing and configuring a server for the US Navy Second Fleet.

5/2002 - 5/2005

Contract Software Developer / System Administration Consultation

Upon moving to the United States Net-A-Porter, my previous employer, asked me to continue to work for them as a contractor, since they were reluctant to lose my experience.

During this time I was involved in a number of application development projects which bought very measurable value to the Net-A-Porter brand and allowed them to continue to expand their business.

Most of the development time during this period was spend expanding upon their existing eCommerce platform, to add features and performance improvements, this included for example developing a new C++ and Perl based search engine which performed ~600% better than the built in search engine and allowed them to develop new category based indexes which pulled results direct from search and still rendered pages 5 times faster than static categories.

Writing log parsers, which allowed for better business analytics and more targeted marketing.

7/2001 - 5/2002

Systems Administrator / IT and Network Manager / Website Manager

Net-A-Porter is the number one fashion eCommerce website in the world valued today at over $550 million.

I was taken on at Net-a-porter as assistant system administrator and web developer, however, on my second day the current team leader quit and I was immediately asked to take over his role, this is a position I took to very comfortably. I was able to grow the control systems infrastructure and website capacity and build a very good IT team.

My work at Net-A-Porter provided them with the ability to grow, as an example of this, when I started with them their annual income was roughly $1.5M and this was pushing the infrastructure to its limits. In 2005 when I stopped working for them, their revenues were closer to $50M with plenty of room to spare on the hardware infrastructure, which I designed and implemented.

Key achievements with Net-A-Porter:

• I wrote about 70% of the visible code at the net-a-porter website, and other than the proprietary ecommerce system 100% of the backend code.
• I managed and helped implement their transition from the original Sun Ultra 10 web server running everything to a distributed network, giving them about 10 times more capacity.
• I Designed and implemented the office transition from 1 office server dealing with all backups, mail functions and file serving functions, to a full data center in the office running a mix of OpenBSD servers, Linux servers, Windows NT servers.
• I supervised moving all the IT functionality to their new office location and personally cabled the entire office spanning 2 floors.

5/2000 - 7/2001

Senior Perl Developer / Assistant System Administrator

I was offered a position working in London as senior Perl developer with Head New Media who at the time were the number 3 rated web design company in the United Kingdom, I was also offered the same position with the 2 rated web company in the UK at the time, however, Head offered more creative freedom.

During this time I worked on a number of B2B and B2C companies from companies ranging from; Mars Inc, to the BBC. I also worked on projects for HSBC bank, Cif household cleaner, and SCI-FI channel UK.

Two of the more interesting project completed during this time were for Octagon Leisure developing their content management system and press relations section. I also developed an internal project for content and project managements.

Additionally I helped develop their in house networks and install and configure a number of Linux based server machines for our external clients. On a day to day basis I would assist the systems administrator with monitoring and troubleshooting the LAN and WAN servers, all of which were based on Redhat Linux.

4/1999 - 5/2000

Web Developer

Motorsports-Online is a web development company in the UK specializing in sites within the motorracing industry. This was my first real IT position and the start of what has been an interesting and exciting career.

At motorsports I primarily worked with Coldfusion, html, css, JavaScript, and Perl

During the course of this job I developed over 10 commercial websites, and worked on development of a full eCommerce system based entirely in Coldfusion. Additionally I developed a real time score display for a television sports channel, the system was based on a Perl backend using a complex mix of DHTML on the front-end.

Skill	Field	Beginner	Mid Level	Advanced	Expert
Perl	Programming
Shell (ksh, bash)	Programming
PHP	Programming
html	Programming
css	Programming
Javascript	Programming
C/C++	Programming
Linux	OS
Solaris 8/9	OS
AIX5L	OS
OpenBSD	OS
FreeBSD	OS
HP-UX	OS
VMware Vsphere (ESX/ESXi)	Virtualization
VMware HA	Virtualization
VirtualBox	Virtualization
XEN	Virtualization
Cisco Switching	Networking
Cisco Routing	Networking
Vyatta	Networking
F5 Load Balancer	Networking
Haproxy	Networking
Postfix	Networking
Squid (proxy)	Networking
Apache	Networking
Tomcat	Networking
Cisco ASA	Security
Iptables	Security
AIDE	Security
Snort	Security
Mysql	Databases
Postgresql	Databases
Sybase	Databases
Oracle	Databases
LDAP	Databases
NetApp	Storage