About the Site
I created DevOps Miami after joking with some friends that PUBG was harder than my job. Shortly after I stood up the site and started training my two friends. After a grueling six months one of them landed a remote job and eventually bought a house and lived happily ever after. The other guy is working with me on v2. Some new folks showed up so working with those now and expanding the lessons.
Off time
I spend my weekends riding around Woodside in my Tspec GTR :D, playing video games, or working on the side projects like this blog. I enjoy track days and hopefully next year we can get more of those in on the bike. Some friends and I hang out on discord where we talk about crypto, hacking, and life.
Youngling Days
From free 1000 hours of AOL Miami chat with sub7 as a script kiddie trolling my sister to hunting video games and software on the piratebay. Napster 58k downloads waiting a week for a song that ends up being the wrong song. I was hanging in anon chat during arab spring and snatched sam files at school. A group policy or two might have been written because of me (haha netsend). Computers opened the world up to me and I've been surfing the web ever since.
Career Historical
13 disassembled and reassembled my first PC. At 15 I got a job at a computer school called Computer Plus where I fixed computers part time after school. I would sit in the A+ and Network+ classes after my shift and soak it all in. High school I was in Cisco networking and Web design and eventually became one of the school websites leads. Lunch time Starcraft and Counter Strike in the computer labs.
Career started at Vernis and Bowling where I virtualized their stack on blade servers, connected all the sites via AD trusts, and rolled out group policy. Eventually I hit all the products WSUS, CAs, remote terminal servers - it was really fun. Did some disaster recovery using Veeam and automation with .bat and group policy then moved on to my next adventure.
First standing ovation in the accounting department of EWC when I wrote my first program to automate their payment process using ACH and Quickbooks plugins in Excel (VBA+PHP). No more manually written checks - it would export open invoice, convert to the correct format for the bank, and then reconciled the results before closing the open invoices which were paid.
Bayview I managed sftp transfers of encrypted financial data from all the major banks in the petabytes and ran the automation platform (tidal) behind their entire ETL process with Dwayne. TB's of encrypted data being managed by some scripts I wrote in bash. I wish I knew how to code back then as I do now. (ssh + gpg)
Kipu I was hired to move them from Heroku to AWS. Ended up architecting their container environment, logging system, and a custom node app to mimic the authentication system. Extremely rewarding work and I earned full remote for the first time in my career. Thousands of nodes and hundreds of sites which were hippa compliant.
CBS Interactive I built them their SFTP system on AWS using Terraform and developed a custom okta integration using python and cloud functions for MFA(push notifications or 2 factor). Threw in a cute node + vuejs app to integrate with Signal Science.
Current job is FinTech so its best not to say much. Much secret. Wow.
All in all I've been diving deeper into the programming side of things to get more done with less. I found it really rewarding to help someone else break out of a crappy day to day so this site scales that.
Cheers,
Rick