closer-io cover letter

gistfile1.txt

To whom it may concern

Thanks to the awesome DevopsWeekly newsletter, I saw that Close.io are hiring an infrastructure/DevOps Engineer. I recently decided to search for a new challenge, and decided to put myself forward.

First a little background: I am a former sound engineer that moved in to IT when I started a family. I basically swapped my hobby (Linux/Dev) with my job. That was a while ago, but is still a good talking point (yes, I worked with many famous people).

After a brief stint in sales, I moved into UNIX development with a large US-based defense contracter. That involved a lot of scripting (shell), Oracle, C and Ada. From there I moved into broadcast world. I was the Linux/Storage/Network Engineer on a small (4-5 people) internal IT team.

I was there for ~4 years where like to think I achieved many things:

- proved that virtualisaion was a thing worth using
   - implimented the initial PoC
   - virtualised ancillary services
   - finally migrated all the core services off physical infrastructure
- Everything was architected to that the business could function 24/7
   - Everything was redundant
   - Even so, everything was reliable
   - The plan was to avoid out-of-hours emergencies (mostly worked)
- Introduced the concept of DevOps practises to the IT team
   - Configuration Management and Infra-as-code (Puppet)
   - Ticketing (Jira) integrated with our knowledge base
   - Infrastructure monitoring (Nagios - I am not proud)
   - Metrics collection (Cacti and Munin)
   - Centralised logging (Rsyslog - Logstash was sadly just a twinkle in Jordan Sissel's eye at the time)
- Helped an R&D team consisting of highly respected video engineers learn about IT as their world merged with mine
- Made sure that the above engineering teams could access, find and process there quite ridiculous amounts of video data
   - Very high performance requirements, especially storage
   - Worked with some of them to develop a catalogue system for there source material
- Supported multiple different web site stacks as the business needs evolved.
- Many more things that I can no long remember/fit on page

From there I moved on when we decided to emmigrate to France. Since then I have been at what Americans would call an MSP (sort of). Again I have done a wide variety of projects:

- EMC storage architecture for a large vSphere environment
- Openstack consulting:
   - architecture/implimentation of everything from small PoC/demo clusters to large production environments
   - Converting application to "cloud-native" (scalable, elastic etc)
- Often working against extremely short (and utterly fixed) deadlines
- Helped stand up the IT teams in new businesses
   - Put backups in place (with testing)
   - Impliment Config Management
   - Build out the basic infrastructure
   - Impliment the logging system (Logstash/Elasticsearch)
   - Impliment alerting and performace metrics (Nagios, Graphite, Sensu)
- Architecture, implimentation and automation of Big Data projects
- Performed a lot of internal R&D on several subjects:
   - Openstack in production
   - Docker in production
   - Scalable storage
   - Automation
   
What has ALWAYS been a constant has been Linux and Open Source.

I hope that the above gives an idea of why I am a good fit.