Summary
10 years of experience writing software to automate the management of infrastructure, support teams, and developers. Or, #devops, as the kids say these days.
- Managed operations of a multi-datacenter Linux private cloud with hundreds of physical hosts and many more virtual hosts
- Personally managed operations of a Ruby on Rails application powered by almost a hunderd servers performing thousands of requests per second
- Developed a Rails app report on and to dispatch Capistrano-powered automated tasks to this infrastructure
- Developed a Ruby API for Puppet, and used it to build Moonshine, an open source Rails configuration management solution with and active community of plugin developers
- Managed a team of Ruby on Rails developers working on a popular mobile game backend
- Managed a worldwide team of engineers responsible for hundreds of Rails appications 24/7/365
Open Source
Some OSS projects I've either developed myself, or managed development of, or participated in.
- GitHub
- github.com/jnewland
Many more on github...
Work Experience
February 2008 - Present
Savannah, Georgia
As the CTO for Rails Machine, I'm responsible for all technical aspects of the only full-stack Ruby on Rails hosting and services company in the world.
Major Accomplishments
- Managed a worldwide team of engineers responsible for hundreds of Rails appications 24/7/365
- Personally managed operations of a Ruby on Rails application powered by almost a hunderd servers performing thousands of requests per second
- Developed a Ruby API for Puppet, and used it to build Moonshine, an open source Rails configuration management solution with and active community of plugin developers
- Developed several Ruby on Rails applications for internal use
August 2005 - July 2008
Atlanta, Georgia
As the IT Director for LexBlog, I managed all of the Information Technology needs of the Lexblog Network (a group of hundreds of Movable Type blogs published by high-profile law firms). I also was responsible for deployment of sites for new clients, close monitoring and maintenance of our web cluster, and all local IT needs.
Major Accomplishments
- Developed several Ruby on Rails applications for internal and external use
- Protyped, implemented, and and currently manage our constantly growing high availability load-balanced web cluster
- Migrated hundredes blogs from shared hosting accounts to our high availability load-balanced web cluster
- Developed a set of standards-compliant Movable Type templates for use on our blogs
- Developed several Movable Type plugins for internal use
August 2004 - December 2005
Athens, Georgia
Jason Lynes Interactive is a web development company run by Jason Lynes. Working with Jason and a small team, I developed custom web applications.
Major Accomplishments
- Develop web applications in for the GUI)
- Work with clients to manage the design approval process
Associate Web Software Developer
May 2005 - August 2005
Athens, Georgia
At Digital Insight I maintained web applications for financial institutions utilizing Javascript. I also created and edited forms for online applications such as personal loans, mortgages, Online Banking Applications, etc. As part of a team, I provided quality assurance for other team members' work.
Major Accomplishments
- Prototyped the use of a Ruby on Rails powered wiki (Instiki to be exact) as an internal whiteboard for others in my Department
- Shattered the DI land speed record for incident response time
May 2005 - August 2005
Athens, Georgia
Sprout is a small business dedicated to creating a suite of web-based apps (written in ) exclusively for businesses with 10 employees or less. I worked as lead developer for Sprout to help them create a core application base that their product could be built upon.
Major Accomplishments
- Created a comprehensive SCM and automated deployment system to aid in collaboration using Subversion, Trac, and some home grown Ruby code
April 2004 - June 2005
Athens, Georgia
At the School of Social Work, I ensured all technical support needs of the School of Social Work were met. These included desktop computer troubleshooting and maintaining a lab of ~50 computers. Another team member and myself managed the content on our department's website (30,000 lines of a wonderful mix of Ruby.
Major Accomplishments
- Prototyped a redesign of our web presence
- Migrating our web/database server from an antiquated RedHat 7.1 server to a new system running SuSE 9.2 Server
- Assisting in development of new admissions database system (generating )
Student Director of Online Operations
April 2002 - April 2004
Athens, Georgia
At the Red & Black, I administrated both local and remote web and mail servers, maintained our network's DHCP and Apache, and maintained all 51 internal workstations.
Major Accomplishments
- Maintain the website of the independent student newspaper The Red and Black
- Maintain and develop applications for our local, private intranet
- Implement configurable spam filtering on our local mail server
- Implement backup solution for our two Mac OS X Servers