Who am I?
I’m a Unix guy, project lead, systems architect, and designer with experience contributing to, leading, and supporting all kinds of IT projects. Through my career, I’ve participated in nearly every aspect of conventional IT operations from research and development, to software tools and build maintenance, to capital planning, to on-call support, and a few stops in-between!
Those who don’t understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
— Henry Spencer
My professional life revolves around systems software and core infrastructure services, but that’s not all I do. My main escape is amateur photography — a small sample of which can be found here.
Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.
— Elliott Erwitt
Things I Know
| Unix systems administration | advanced |
| Bourne shell programming and configuration | advanced |
| Storage system planning and design | advanced |
| x86 virtualization technology: VMware, Xen, KVM, RHEV, jail | advanced |
| Amazon Web Services | intermediate |
| Google Cloud Platform | basic |
| Network file services | advanced |
| BlueArc/Hitachi storage system administration | intermediate |
| System automation and deployment: Puppet, Chef, Kickstart, Red Hat Satellite | advanced |
| Regular expressions | advanced |
| Python | intermediate |
| Perl | intermediate |
| HTML / CSS / PHP | intermediate |
| C | intermediate |
| OpenLDAP | intermediate |
| MariaDB (MySQL) configuration and administration | intermediate |
| Domain name services, BIND, DHCP | advanced |
| Network Time Protocol | intermediate |
| IP networking, routing, Ethernet, switching | intermediate |
| Open source software licensing and integration | advanced |
| Unix and network security, firewalls | advanced |
| Software configuration management and revision control | advanced |
| GCC toolchain, GNU autotools, make varaints, build automation | intermediate |
| Unix software packaging, documentation, and distribtion | intermediate |
| Helpdesk and support best practices (ITIL certification) | advanced |
| Web publishing and automation | intermediate |
| SNMP and systems monitoring | intermediate |
My Career
I’m currently employed by CBC/Radio-Canada, over the years I’ve held many roles both as an employee, and as an expert and consultant.
1998 — 2005
For the first 7 years of my career I worked for, the now sadly defunct, Nortel Networks R&D arm: Bell-Northern Research. What started as a fun co-op term, became the formative period of my professional life and an irreplaceable opportunity to learn in an incredibly vibrant intellectual and professional environment. It’s not every day that one gets to play tag along with some of Canada’s top technical minds!
At Nortel I was first a junior member of the Norstar development support helpdesk and later worked as a Windows, Solaris, and Linux systems administrator. Eventually, as my career advanced, I specialized in software development tools and build automation for the Enterprise Networks division. These were heady days of Y2K overtime and before anybody had heard of a dot-com bubble…
Among the many interesting projects I worked on during my tenure at Nortel, I acted as the open source software lead during the port of Business Communicatons Manager from embedded Windows to Nortel Carrier Grade Linux (NCGL).
All in all, this was a wonderful learning experience working on interesting technical problems with motivated and talented co-workers!
2005 — 2006
After Nortel Networks, I spent most of the next two years working as a freelance IT consultant, infecting my clients’ environments with FreeBSD. In 2006, I moved to the GTA to work for a logistics and shipping software company. In this role I was a project leader implementing software development tools and processes for the internal development team.
2006 — 2011
In the summer of 2006 I started my dream job as a Unix administrator, supporting and maintaining systems on behalf of the corporate infrastructure team for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. My primary area of responsibility was supporting various Linux, HP-UX, and FreeBSD systems for the English Services website: CBC.ca.
This job was a incredible opportunity to tackle the challenges of serving a large scale, popular, international news and entertainment website during a period of rapid technological growth and change.
2011 — 2013
For two years I was a senior member and leader on the back-end development team for CBC.ca holding the position of senior systems architect.
In this role I worked closely with management, solutions architects, and back-end developers on a range of platform improvement and integration initiatives. This team was awarded a CBC/Radio-Canada President’s Award for Technological Innovation in recognition of our efforts to improve and automate sports data feeds for the Internet.
2013 — Today
For the past several years, I’ve been employed as a systems designer and project lead in media engineering. My primary area of repsonsibility has been to plan, design, and manage projects selecting and integrating enterprise storage systems.
During this time I’ve also led and contributed to many other initiaitves involving media archive digitization, studio and control room systems implementation, systems virtualization, and media asset management.
More
- Member of the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers
- Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- Member of the IEEE Computer Society and USENIX
- Member of the Free Software Foundation
- Past Ontario Director and Toronto Branch Secretary of the Association of Professionals and Supervisors
- Former Secretary of the Ottawa Valley Systems Administrators Guild (OV-SAGE)
Internet
If you are intersted in discussing a project that you think I might be able to help you with, you can contact me here.
The Internet is a surprisingly small place, hopefully our paths will cross!