Resume for Scott Laird

  • Experienced programmer in Ruby, Perl, and C.
  • Substantial experience with Ruby on Rails; major contributor to Typo weblog system (http://typo.leetsoft.com).
  • Specializes in fast, reliable systems from commodity hardware on reasonable budgets.
  • Nearly 15 years Unix and Linux experience, professional system administrator since 1996.
  • Experience managing over 700 critical production systems on 3 continents.
  • Years of network experience with routers and switches.
  • Substantial experience with Asterisk and VoIP systems.
  • Highly effective troubleshooter and debugger.

Recent Work Experience

Google

Kirkland, WA
Sr. Site Reliability Engineer 2005-

Network Clarity (defunct)

Seattle, WA
Sr. Systems Engineer
2002-2005

Programmer and system administrator for a network management startup. I was responsible for building the core OS for our appliance-based network configuration management system. This included a custom Linux distribution, as well as build, install, update, and management tools. I was also the release manager for our product, system administrator for internal systems, and part-time network engineer.

Our software was written in Java using J2EE; while I’m not a Java programmer, I was deeply involved in debugging interactions between our Java code and the rest of our system.

Technologies used: Linux (Debian, Red Hat, and our own custom distribution), Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Perl, C, PostgreSQL, Cisco IOS, Cisco CatOS, LDAP, Samba.

Reason for leaving: laid off with half of the staff due to funding shortcomings.

Internap Network Services

Seattle, WA
Sr. Systems Engineer
1998-2002

Early employee at a large business network service provider. Responsible for managing 700+ servers in Japan, the US, and Europe. I was also responsible for most server architecture decisions and budgeting. Other major responsibilities:

  • I wrote the server management package that we used to control the software installed on all of our systems. This enabled us to maintain rigid control over all systems in a 24x7 mission-critical environment with only a small group of system administrators.

  • I was primarily responsible for our backup system, doing network backups of all systems nightly. Designed, budgeted, maintained, and did capacity planning during hyper-growth (2x in 45 days) as well as slower growth periods.

  • I helped our department maintain a strong reputation within the company for accomplishing difficult tasks substantially under budget. I specialize in building reliable systems using commodity hardware, and this served us well during the boom years as well as the slower years that followed.

  • I was responsible for the email system that kept our email-centric company running. Most customer contact was via email, so our network operations group had extreme requirements for email availability.

  • I was the final line of technical support for most server and many network layer 4+ questions within the company, and occasionally for customers as well.

  • I was responsible for the DNS servers that handled most of our customers’ DNS needs, including Fortune 500 companies and large entities like the New York Stock Exchange. These customers paid for, expected, and received extremely high reliability.

  • I ran monthly training sessions to introduce junior members of our team to new technologies that we were considering deploying. These included a 5-15 page paper explaining the topic of the discussion and a 60-90 minute talk. I also wrote several long papers describing internal tools that we had developed, and traveled to introduce our management and distribution framework to new groups that we acquired.

  • During the earlier portion of my career, I was part of the on-call rotation responsible for handling after-hours network outages. During on-call weeks, I was routinely responsible for handling all types of network related problems (downed circuits, BGP problems, etc.) during all hours of the night.

Technologies: Linux (Debian and Red Hat), Solaris, OSF/1, Perl, Ruby, C, Legato Networker, Sendmail, Exim, CommuniGate Pro, SNMP, Cisco IOS, Cisco CatOS.

Reason for leaving: The company moved its headquarters from Seattle to Atlanta; I declined their relocation offer.

Pacific Rim Networks

(now part of Verio)
Bellingham, WA
System Administrator
1997-1998

Sole system administrator for a regional ISP. Responsible for everything from technical support to routing, Radius, email, Usenet, dial-up, web hosting, and customer management.

Open-source and self-directed experience

Although I have a college degree, I’m largely self-taught. I am continually exploring new topics for my own enjoyment, and usually find ways to apply them to my job. A few of my recent interests include:

Linux

I’ve been using Linux since August 1992, both at home and professionally. I’m generally most comfortable with the Debian distribution, but I’m able to find my way around any system, and have frequently found myself building small Linux distributions for things like install disks and recovery tools. I can diagnose and debug problems at all levels, from hardware and device drivers, through network services, and up into desktop and configuration issues.

Typo / Ruby on Rails

I’ve been programming in Ruby since 2002, when I realized how much I disliked all of the magic inherent in Perl. More recently, I’ve been using Ruby on Rails for a number of personal and professional projects, including the Typo (http://typo.leetsoft.com) weblog engine. I’m currently a major contributor to Typo, and have written the theming system, tags, filtering plugin system, and a number of other substantial projects.

Asterisk / VoIP

I’ve been using the Asterisk Voice over IP system at home for over a year. I built a complete PBX system using commercially available phones and hardware, plus the open-source Asterisk VoIP software.

Education

I have a BS in Computer Science from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.