resume

James T. Dennis

(650) 279-4059 (cell)
answrguy@gmail.com

____________________________________________________________________________

Experience:

I've worked in the IT, QA, and technical support departments at some of the largest software publishers and internet media companies in the industry. I've also run my own consulting service, developed scripting/programming courseware and taught classes and seminars (part time) at the college level, written a book on systems administration and played key technical roles at a couple of start ups.

Ooyala, Inc.

Site Reliability Engineer

3/2012 to 11/2012

Performed Cassandra cluster upgrades and repairs for 6 clusters (production and development)
Created new Cassandara clusters for new projects
Acting MySQL DBA during a critical personnel change (including multi-master/slave clusters)
Hapoop Administrator (also Apache Kakfa, Twitter Storm, and Zookeeper)
Managed a large AWS infrastructure (up to 1000 instances at any given time)
AWS automation using Python Boto, DNSPython, and Redis
Deployment of Ruby using Capistrano, Rake and Fezzik
Extensive use of git, Nagios/CheckMK, Jira, Jenkins, Puppet (transitioning to Chef) and other tools.

Yahoo, Inc.

Service Engineer

9/2009 to 2/2012

Revamped automation for federating advertising clients in the Guaranteed Delivery infrastructure (appox. 20,000 clients talking to over 1,300 middle tier servers)
Wrote classh (cluster administrator's SSH wrapper) as a simplified utility concurrently running ad hoc jobs on thousands of targets (and as library for custom scripts)
Wrote distargs (distribute arguments/targets) a queue for distributing target hostnames to jobs in a coherent and flexible way (for controlled parallelization of rolling deployments and service restarts across complex clusters).

Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

Senior It Staff Linux Engineer

2/2005 to 6/2009

Served as highest internal point of escalation for all Linux OS-level IT issues
Developed advanced training materials (Linux troubleshooting and administration) for world-wide internal use
Providing training and mentoring for all North American and European IT personnel
Selected, deployed and maintained the internal wiki servers (including integration with LDAP and CSS customizations)
Debugged technical issues down to the kernel level, developed and applied patches to kernel and system packages (including extensive use of strace, ltrace, and some gdb and SystemTap)
Packaged internally written scripts and third-party software (RPM .spec files)
Acted as primary vendor liaison to Red Hat Inc. and Novell
Provided key role in vendor contract negotiations to significantly reduce subscription and support costs
Moderated weekly conference call (with agenda and notes on the wiki)
Oversaw resolution of all major technical issues (NFS, automount, LDAP, etc) impacting Linux over approximately 8000 servers
Served as OS developer support for R&D as well as IT applications developers
Occasionally accompanied field sales engineers during external customer engagements and consistently resolved their issues

Bradford Learning Inc.

Courseware Developer (contractor)

9/2002 to 12/2002

Taught Linux (LPI compliant) classes to strategic customers like Cadence Software and Well Fargo
Revised and updated LPI 101 and LPI 102 courseware.
Customized content and scheduling to meet customer needs:
- Fitting two five days courses into one (Well Fargo)
- Customizing material to emerging desktop and helpdesk needs (from the traditional server, and systems administration focus)
Principle subject matter expert and author for advanced LPI 2 certification courseware.

Quantum Storage Systems Group

Developer (contractor)

1/2002 to 7/2002

Developed Linux kernel device drivers and patches (MTD flash, custom info, and watchdog drivers).
Monitored, merged and maintained various kernel patches (especially XFS and ACL enhancement sets).
Provided code reviews and recommended bug fixes throughout the GuardianOS (NAS turnkey/embedded system) code base.
Reviewed and revised their build system and all software requirements and enhancements.
Ported GuardianOS to a new platform (with only two assistants).
Provided developer support for all Linux programming APIs from system calls and kernel through libc functions and up to shell, Perl, and Python scripting.

2Wire, Inc.

Senior Systems Administrator

6/2001 to 11/2001

Supervised junior system administrators. Interviewed and selected for IT positions.
Provided deployment and testing architectures and infrastructure for custom clustered n-tier Java servlet and MS SQL CRM application suite.
Recommended and implemented all UNIX/Linux systems security measures and policies.
Provided senior support for all Linux and UNIX applications, utilities, and programming APIs
Automated software distribution and cluster management processes and scripts (including fully automated OS installation and configuration using custom enhancements to Kickstart).

AXIS Personal Trainers & Spa

Manager, Systems Analyst

10/2000 to 4/2001

Implemented recovery (backup) plans and procedures.
Recommended and implemented data integrity and security systems.
Helped design and maintain client management, billing and scheduling software.
Maintained PostgreSQL databases and servers.
Managed systems and network administration staff.
Built the corporate data center from scratch.
Managed desktop (client) systems and support.
Responsible for routers and desktop (point-of-sale) systems for three facilities and approx. 100 users.
Recruited, interviewed and helped select IT staff
Recovered corrupted databases (legacy application)

Linuxcare

Senior Consultant

2/1999 to 10/2000

Consistently brought customers back for additional business.
Provided highest point of escalation for technical support issues for our call center
Perform training of internal technical support staff.
Manage and participate in professional services contracts for key strategic customers such as Motorola and Transmeta (usually supervising one to three associates).
Compose and edit training materials and present classes in various technical Linux and UNIX topics to Linuxcare customers and partners such as Hitachi and SGI.

Starshine Technical Services

Consulting Partner

8/1996 to 2/1999

Co-wrote and published Linux System Administration (New Riders Publishing, 2000).
Provided system administration training and support services for customers ranging from small business (SOHO) through the U.S. Postal Service (San Mateo Data Processing Center). (customer references available upon request).
Built custom servers (primarily routers, firewalls, mail and FTP/web and intranet servers).
Wrote articles for Linux Journal and Sysadmin Magazine.
Maintain "The Answer Guy" column and other articles for the Linux Gazette.
Prepared and presented tutorial/seminar for LinuxWorld Expo (Security for System Administrators).
(Part-time instructor at Mission College: UNIX Shell Programming)

McAfee Associates

System Administrator

1/1995 to 8/1996

Prototyped e-commerce system (used in production for several months - handling over $25K/month in sales and used as model for later production releases "almost line for line")
Managed their Internet routers, DNS zones and restructured their namespace to provide near infinite scalability. Created secure private zones.
Increased their FTP capacity and web capacity by an order of magnitude by implementing "round-robin" DNS load-balancing.
Improved network security by configuring packet filters on the border routers and deploying the Internet Junction IPX to TCP/IP gateway. Recommended RFC1918 "private net" addressing for some departments (for additional security and IP address conservation and lower maintenance effort and costs).
Upgraded them from a single T1 to four T1s and an OC-12 with redundant service providers.
Designed and installed intranet which became focal point for all intra-departmental communications and automated "paperless” workflow.
Completely revamped Internet mail services, installed and maintained Majordomo and Smartlist automated mail list management packages. Managed 100,000 subscriber announcement lists.
Wrote procmail automated response "mailbots” and automated mail dispatch and sorting.
Designed regression and competitive analysis scripts for all anti-virus products.

Symantec's Peter Norton Computing

Support Analyst

2/1992 to 12/1994

Provided all training for new members of this team Designed and presented training materials on the Internet (as it related to Symantec reps at that time) Helped design and refine training materials on DOS Data Recovery.
Primary SysOp: CompuServe Network Products forum (SYMNET).
Secondary WizOp: All Symantec and Central Point CIS forums.
Primary SysOp: Symantec and Central Point Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes)
Provided technical support for all "Norton” DOS and Windows Products.
Tested products under development, reported problems and suggested enhancements. Also responsible for technical review of documentation.
Prepared and delivered employee classes in:
- PC architecture and DOS memory management concepts
- Data recovery and low level disk structures
- Internet services and acceptable use
- Fundamental Unix skills

Education:

Santa Monica College
Santa Monica, CA (Part-time) Computer Programming (C, C++, x86 Assembly)Portland Community College
Portland, OR (Part-time) Computer Software Technician's program (Pascal)

Professional Affiliations:

USENIX (Open Systems Professionals) & SAGE,
LPI (Linux Professionals Institute)
BayLISA (Bay Area Chapter Large Installation System Administration)
and several local UNIX and Linux user's groups.