Colin Shea

A Programmer, Sysadmin, and DevOps Expert

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https://nogweii.net/

(646) 847-8929

Phoenix, AZ

USA

Technical Skills

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Experience

Qwick, Inc.

Staff DevOps Engineer

June 2022 - Present

Leveling up the organization's DevOps chops as they were all developers without the appropriate specialized skillset. Instituted a number of reforms to allow for automated management with significant improvements to security.

  • Rebuilt production with zero downtime from manually created Kubernetes 1.18 deployment to EKS 1.24 with Terraform.
  • Upgraded the database clusters from PostgreSQL 11 to 15 in RDS
  • Spearheaded multiple significant security improvements and penetration tests
  • Created and lead the Open Source Office and Compliance program
  • Authorized dozens of documents, allowing colleagues to grok the network and improve on-call troubleshooting

Get Together, Inc.

Senior DevOps Engineer

November 2021 - May 2022

Owned the developer experience tools that developers interacted with. Furthering automation to allow my team to focus on projects rather than ad-hoc requests.

  • Managed servers in AWS to power an ECS (Elastic Container Service) cluster.
  • Automated infrastructure with CloudFormation with an eye towards a Terraform replacement.
  • Supported a PHP application powered by MySQL and Redis.
  • Managed a fleet of build servers for running CI in Buildkite.
  • Integrated a ChatOps approach to connect Github and Slack with a Python chatbot.

StrongMind

DevOps Engineer III

November 2017 - July 2021

Responsible for introducing various DevOps inspired practices and mentalities to the entire organization, along with migrating physical compute loads to the cloud. A heterogeneous network of Ubuntu and Windows across a broad hybrid cloud of VMWare, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud Platform deployments.

  • Introduced and taught Confirmation Management and Infrastructure as Code concepts to automate every team's operations.
  • Lead development of a full observability stack with centralized logging, unified metrics, and distributed tracing.
  • Developed internal tooling with Go, Ruby and Python to bridge various external APIs and glue internal microservices together.
  • Lead developer on a complete company-wide architectural overhaul to event-driven paradigms.
  • Lead multiple teams, training people with no prior experience to mid-level developers.
  • Contributed to the company's applications in Ruby, Python, C#, and TypeScript

Really Simple, Inc

Senior System Administrator

November 2016 - May 2017

Automation for an AWS based infrastructure with heavy integration of RedHat management technologies, supporting a hybrid Spring Boot, Tomcat and node.js platform.

  • Ansible used to provision, deploy, and configure every server, and every service.
  • Built automation to create clones of production for clients and contractors.
  • Managed security policies and handled incoming reports.
  • Deployed Prometheus for monitoring, Logstash for centralized logging, LYNIS and OpenSCAP for auditing, Spacewalk for patch management, FreeIPA for AAA
  • Developed internal tooling with Go, Ruby and Python to automate deployment and management
  • Used Docker to create reusable containers across production and testing environments
  • Jenkins used for continuous integration of Java, Node.js and Ansible code. Continuous deployment via RPM packages.

Internet Security Research Group

System Administrator

December 2015 - August 2016

Deployment and management of Let's Encrypt in a highly secure environment to create the first truly open CA. Part of the team shepherding it from closed beta to general access.

  • Created policies to use public cloud infrastructure alongside the existing secure datacenters.
  • Worked with auditors and root trust programs to create and operate a high trust network.
  • Developed custom saltstack formulas for a variety of standard management tools within the high trust network.
  • Worked with the developers of boulder in Go and certbot in Python to help automate the creation of over 5 million TLS certificates, creating one of the largest certificate authorities in the world
  • Continuous integration of application code using Travis CI with continuous deployment via RPM packages.

The Evogi Group

Lead System Administrator

September 2013 - June 2015

Configuration, monitoring, and deployment of 1,000+ Ubuntu and CentOS servers in AWS running Ruby on Rails, Java, Erlang and Go applications.

  • Developed custom internal applications for the operations and development teams, in Ruby, Go, and Java
  • Transitioned from a monolithic server architecture to a multi-tiered architecture using Amazon VPC
  • Revamped the authentication and structure for the internal admin panel of the Rails code base
  • Modernized configuration management and deployment using Chef 12 and Amazon EC2 Autoscaling
  • Deployed applications to Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk, and other PaaS services
  • Set up Nagios, Icinga, Shiken and ELK stacks to monitor components of the network
  • Helped administrate multiple MySQL databases with terabytes of data
  • Maintained patches against upstream gems and cookbooks to use internally developed libraries
  • Set up TeamCity for continuous integration with Rails initiated by Github webhooks

Certifications

SaltStack Certified Engineer April 2016 - Present SaltStack, Inc
Security+ April 2010 - Present CompTIA
Linux+ April 2010 - Present CompTIA
Network+ October 2009 - Present CompTIA
A+ (IT Technician) June 2009 - Present CompTIA

Education

University of Advancing Technology, Tempe, Arizona USA

2010 - 2013

Triple Major: Open Source Technologies, Network Security & Network Engineering  

Colin Shea — colin@shea.at — References available upon request.