Education
Iowa State University
Ames - 2022 to 2024: In progress M.S. Cybersecurity
University of Northern Iowa
Cedar Falls - 2010 to 2015: B.A. History
Work History
University of Northern Iowa
Senior Systems Administrator - Cedar Falls - 2022 to Present
As a senior, I work educate coworkers and establish long-term goals with my team, alongside previous responsibilities.
Systems and Network Administrator - Cedar Falls - 2016 to 2022
I focus on automation to support a variety of servers and clusters. I interact with a broad range of
techonologies and resources to help provide reliable IT at UNI.
Aces
IT Client Support - Cedar Falls - 2015 to 2016
Direct client support for desktops and server administration for a healthcare provider. Through this role I
was exposed to a large swath of routine business and healthcare specific software. I developed the skills
necessary to continue my career by working with networking and server technologies such as DHCP, DNS,
firewalls, and vSphere management.
Experience
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Cross-team communication. In my first few years at University of Northern Iowa, I
worked with both the system administrator team and network teams. I used the tools from one team to help
the other -- managing servers with Puppet, securing web access with certificates, creating a development
workflow using GitLab, and building a more efficient network access control system.
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Discover and improve. A key strength I have developed over the years has been the
ability to discover the "ins and outs" of a system or software. When IT was relied on to take over a
failing HPC cluster, I was able to figure out how to access, secure, and administer the aging system
with minimal interruption for the few users. I have since continued to incrementally improve the HPC
offering by building an in-house solution when the previous one failed, finally, helping to plan and
implement a new cluster in 2022.
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Ensuring longevity of services. Services should be maintainable over time, this
requires proper planning to assess needs of a project, constant re-evalution during the implementation
and early years, and up-to-date documentation and monitoring. I have worked on a variety of large scale
projects that require accounting for a diverse set of goals. I have worked to ensure that these projects
are successful both on launch, but maintainable and continue to be extend past their initial
availability. Examples of this: Transistion from Samanage to Jira Service Desk & Implementation of Jira
Projects (2019) and Zoom Phone Evaluation (2020-2021).
Acknowledgements and Continuing Education
- Throughput Computing; HPC Conference Madison, WI - 2023
- Panther First award; Service Hub Implementation (Jira Service Desk) - 2019
- PCI Certified - 2018 to 2022
- Avaya Aura Certification - 2018
- HIPAA Certification - 2015 and 2016
Specific Skills
- Languages: Bash, Python
- Configuration Management: Puppet
- Web: Apache, MySQL, Redis, PHP/HTML/CSS/JS, WordPress
- Authentication: integrating into login systems: LDAP, Active Directory, SAML
- Systems: Linux, vSphere, Docker (testing only)
- Workflow: GitLab CI, Rundeck, Jira
- Logging, Alerting, & Metrics: rsyslog, ELK (and OpenSearch, etc),
Icinga, PagerDuty, Prometheus, Grafana
Special Projects
- Centralized logging: I took over a failing single node log search server (Graylog) and
migrated to a multi-node Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana cluster. I maintained an evaluation
deployment of that service for several
years as it gained support and traction for the value offered. In January 2022, I deployed OpenSearch as
a near production centralized log cluster.
- IT service management platform migration: I worked with a small team to review and
evaluate replacement options for our feature limited service platform. We chose Jira Service Desk to
integrate with another product that was
being implemented simultaneously — Jira Software. I served on both teams and helped to ensure the
products would be a good fit and the decisions that were made helped to align with IT's goals for
customer service. I also handled the migration
of data from our previous ticket system to Jira Service Desk by creating custom API tooling.
- Web learning application: I maintained a custom application that allows instructors to
teach classes about WordPress, SEO, MySQL databases, and web development for two years before beginning
a full rebuild to support Python
3. I built a new backend layer and adapted the PHP web frontend to be more secure and have an updated
look. The backend uses Redis for user caching and task scheduling and has a custom API to interface with
directly as well as be the connection
to the frontend. I also integrated the frontend login to the campus solution.