Hello World from tkjef

Just starting a personal blog here to talk about some things of interest such as
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 and apps in various languages
and with various dbs. 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) which was up for 1 1/2 years. 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 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 with zless/zgrep is very nice.

I have a few open source projects you can check out on my github: https://github.com/tkjef
Looking to create more and work on other projects.