Hello World from tkjef
Just starting a personal blog
to talk about things of interest:
git, sre, load testing, security
& the hashicorp tool chain
Might touch on some Kubernetes
or general internet-related topics as well.
Will be running some benchmarks of tools,
setups & apps.
I’ve been working with AWS for 6+ years,
Linux for 11+ years,
and was a Ragga-Jungle/Dubstep/Hip-Hop DJ in Los Angeles before that.
Recently, was quoted in the O’Reilly book Seeking SRE by David Blank-Edelman.
Started with PHP & Flash in 2007
and made a music downloads website
called digitaldubbed.com (defunct) up for 1.5 yrs.
That sparked the dev fire.
After a bit of spamming on Twitter
I landed a freelance client in the Hollywood area,
quit my job, and started freelance developing full-time.
With more clients in tow came standardizing the work,
using different languages (Javascript, C#)
& setting up and storing code/db backups.
Also, created a couple of Android apps in
Java using Eclipse (Android Studio wasn’t around yet!).
Chasing down clients for money got a little old
so ended up landing at a small startup under the
umbrella of Realtor.com and working with Perl and Postgres.
I’d never worked with Perl before, but it was a blast.
Also, geekuni.com had just launched for Perl training
so I felt like even though the language wasn’t
extremely popular there were some resources.
It also ended up making me better at Linux.
This is where I was introduced to AWS, Jenkins & Puppet.
As well as doing some light DBA work.
Fast-forward a few years, looking for new jobs led me into Ruby On Rails,
but after a few months went back to PHP and landed at Magento.
There I automated the testing workflows with Vagrant to accommodate
all variations of technology that were officially supported by Magento.
This enabled engineers to spin up isolated test environments
from customer code/db backups, do aggressive/destructive testing,
then destroy the test env.
After that, moved onto Directv where I saw a lot of the inefficiences
that SRE work could solve, geeked out on satellites (they ran Debian6!),
spun up a K8s POC, and moved onto a medium-sized startup
as a Java dev (with an Operations focus).
First project was re-writing the geo-ip lookup Class.
Ongoing work consisted of reviewing bi-weekly github sprint commits
for areas of improvement or discussion.
I quite enjoyed the mix of dev, review of code & working with servers,
but the trappings of a healthy bottom line (they did well)
made moving to the cloud not an essential business requirement.
This led to wayward cloud initiatives with multiple attempts at moving to AWS failing.
Did I mention this was also a Windows Server shop?
With a fair amount of tech debt.
While the foray back into dev was fun, my heart is in SRE work.
Since then I’ve been working with Terraform a TON, Chef (mostly), Puppet (somewhat) and Salt (currently).
Also, currently using Consul & Nomad while looking at Kubernetes for some POCs to benchmark against that.
Worked with lots of monitoring, logging and apm options.
I like vim.
And less.
And gzip w/ zless/zgrep.
And bash.
And perl.
And php.
what.
I have a few open source projects
you can check out on my github.com/tkjef
Looking to create more
and work on other projects.