Professional Profile
A Senior Cloud Engineer and Full Stack Developer currently living in Murfreesboro, TN. My mission in life is to Receive, Restore, and Communicate Wholeness in myself and others. Problem solving is easily one of my favorite things to do. Whether it’s building applications, automating highly-available infrastructure, or tinkering with broken machinery, I love working to reach a solution.
I strive to understand all aspects of a given subject. This has driven me to learn all aspects of web development, be it front-end, back-end, or server administration. My extensive experience in writing software paired with my experience in designing and building infrastructure make me uniquely suited to most positions. I am able to not only write an application's software, but also the infrastructure needed to support the application, as well as the software needed to support the infrastructure itself.
Strengths Finder
- Relator
- Learner
- Intellection
- Adaptability
- Responsibility
Technical Accomplishments
- I am an AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate.
- I was the tech lead responsible for authoring Altis DXP's customer hosting infrastructure based on Docker, ECS, and Terraform.
- I have managed the migration from a CloudFormation/EC2 based infrastructure to a Terraform/ECS based infrastructure without the need for downtime (though with an edit lock on the database).
- I have routinely contributed new features to a backend PHP API and frontend Dashboard used to manage hosting infrastructure.
- I have written software which monitors active ECS Deployments to prevent failing deployments from being attached to the Load Balancer. It detects when ECS is unable to provision containers on EC2 hosts, when containers are unable to start, and other conditions.
- I have written multiple Lambda functions to facilitate operations and infrastructure monitoring.
- I have written Docker containers which manage building static assets locally and in production.
- I have written a Go CLI tool to ingest the output of
mysqldump
and transform it to anonymize data. - I have written a NodeJS package that assists me with ensuring certain Environment Variables are present on AWS Lambda functions.
- I have written a Terraform module which makes it easy to package Lambda functions using Terraform without a manual build process.
- I have written a NodeJS CLI tool for creating an
aws_cloudformation_stack
Terraform resource and populating its parameters. It was made to facilitate managing CloudFormation resources using Terraform. - I have contributed to Terraform's AWS provider when I am able.
- I have investigated and diagnosed infrastructure failures as well as authored Root Cause Analysis documents to be presented to clients.
- I have extensive experience writing developer documentation and user guides, as well as public speaking and internal training.
- I have extensive experience working with AWS services such as EC2, Auto Scaling, ECS, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, RDS MySQL, RDS Aurora, ElastiCache for Memcached, ElastiCache for Redis, SSM Parameter Store, AWS Certficate Manager, Application Load Balancer, Lambda, CloudFront, CloudWatch, S3, and others.
Technical Skills
AWS
Advanced, 5 years
Extensive experience hosting high-traffic applications (60M+ requests/mo) managed by Terraform and CloudFormation.
Terraform
Advanced, 5 years
Extensive user and author of modules. I have also contributed to Terraform upstream. Packer is also used for building server images.
Commandline
Advanced, 7 years
Power user. I live on the keyboard. Vim is my text-editor of choice and Bash scripts are my friend.
PHP
Advanced, 10 years
Well versed in functional and object-oriented programming. Experience with Zend, Phalcon, and WordPress.
NodeJS
Intermediate, 5 years
Extensive experience writing AWS Lambda functions as well as writing cli tools.
Go
Beginner, 1 year
Familiar with basic language constructs; I have written a CLI tool
Frontend
Intermediate, 13 years
React/Redux, Meteor, Angular, and jQuery. Well versed in preprocessors: SASS, LESS, HAML, and Pug.
Public Speaking
Advanced, 10 years
I've spoken at a number of conferences and my degree is in Public Speaking. I am very comfortable in front an audience. You can watch a few of my talks or view the slides.
Work Experience
Senior Cloud Engineer
March 2017 - Present
Human Made / Altis DXP
Primarily responsible for the design of the latest version of our Hosting infrastructure. Additionally responsible for day-to-day support and operational tasks. I have been spearheading the task of migrating from EC2/CloudFormation based environments to ECS/Terraform environments. I spend most of my time interacting with AWS services such as ECS, RDS, Lambda, and Cloudwatch, as well as software services like ZenDesk and GitHub.
Sole Proprietor
August 2009 - March 2017
Fight the Current
My personal business venture. I've been a Front End developer, Back End Developer, DevOps Engineer, Video Editor, Camera Operator, and Graphic Designer. Over the course of time I recognized that software development was my strength and altered course. Now I am working as a DevOps engineer working with tools like Vagrant, Ansible, and Hashicorp's Terraform and Packer, making sure all the things are automated and play well together.
Full Stack Developer
January 2015 - December 2015
Gateway Church - Table.org
My primary responsibility is migrating our manually-configured infrastructure over to AWS using Vagrant, Ansible, and Hashicorp's Terraform and Packer. I've built a statistics aggregator microservice using the Phalcon PHP framework, an internal support tool using AngularJS, and a dynamically-generated static dashboard using Rails. I have also been responsible for maintaining and extending a Zend Framework application.
Subcontractor/Development Partner
January 2013 - December 2014
Pressware.co
A partnership between Tom McFarlin and I developing custom solutions using WordPress. Built numerous solutions ranging from custom business directories to WordPress themes and plugins.
Education
B.A. in Media and Communication Studies
August 2006 - May 2010
Florida State University
I received a diverse education in Broadcasting, Advertising, and Mass Communications. I learned communication theory and gained hands on experience planning advertising and social marketing campaigns.
Contact
@nathanielks everywhere