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Hire Me
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AARON C. DE BRUYN

Systems Engineer, Developer, Consultant

I solve problems using Linux, Windows, Python, Django, Node.js, TCP/IP, Docker,
Kubernetes, virtualization, automation, and engineering practices

 * aaron@heyaaron.com
 * 360-200-1742

 * Experiences
 * Skills
 * Portfolio
 * About Me
 * Contact


WORK EXPERIENCES


CONTRACTOR

Vancouver, WA
Consultant/Systems Engineer
May 2018 - Present

Work with a leading dental provider to improve service and reduce costs related
to their network infrastructure, data center, and external contractors. Assisted
in building an in-house support team to replace their existing managed service
provider. Replaced multiple external vendors with internal solutions customized
to fit their business processes while drastically reducing costs. Reduced
infrastructure deployment time and costs for new practices, standardized on
equipment to reduce support costs, and trained new staff. Designed and developed
an internal tracking systems to replace external contractors and vendors for
statistics and financial information automatically from practices offices.
Worked with Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Asterisk, Eaglesoft, Dentrix, ELK, Salt,
Python, Django.


SIGNAL IDS

Winlock, WA
Security Engineer
June 2018 - May 2021

Designed and built intfrastructure to support a cloud-based managed intrusion
detection service as well as providing support to customers and sales teams for
auditing and compliance reporting using FreeBSD, Docker, Kubernetes, Suricata,
Python, Django, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Salt.


CTRL ALT IT

Winlock, WA
Systems Engineer
March 2018 - Present

Launched a business to support a number of clients, with a focus on medical and
small business. Designed and released a packaged solution that addresses
HIPAA-compliance issues that can scale from small practices to large
enterprises. Provided a stable network environment, security of patient data,
disaster recovery, monitoring, alerting, user support, data analytics, and
software development.


MSP DNA

Winlock, WA
Developer
2015 - December 2019

Developed a variety of products designed to enable managed service providers to
remotely support and manage their client networks. Technologies primarily
consisted of Django, Node JS, Visual Basic, and C# along with tools like Redis,
Postgres, Elasticsearch, HAProxy, Docker and Vagrant.


ROKA SECURITY

Herndon, VA
Developer / Systems Engineer
January 2017 - May 2018

Worked remotely as a Developer on a secure communications application using
several technologies including Django, Salt, MySQL, Apache, Vagrant, Node.js,
Mongo, and Redis. After project completion I transferred to the commercial
services security division to work as a systems engineer managing and supporting
the intrusion detection ecosystem involving technologies like Elasticsearch,
Django, Salt, Node.js, MySQL, Nginx, MongoDB, Snort, and Bro until the
administration decided there was no money to be made from commercial intrusion
detection services.


UTILIZE I.T., INC.

Longview, WA
Systems Engineer
2007 - January 2017

Working as a systems engineer for a family-owned business serving a wide variety
of clients that need network design, management, and support without the cost of
employing a full-time team of staff.

My primary clients include:

 * A large network of approximately 27 sites connected via VPN links over public
   internet connections. Their primary dental applications are Windows-based,
   however the routers and firewalls are FreeBSD-based, and each site has at
   least one Linux server to provide virtualization of their Windows
   infrastructure. Additionally there are a few dozen servers that provide
   intra-office messaging, e-mail, management, monitoring, alerting, spam
   filtering, and off-site backups.
 * A large manufacturing facility where I assisted in maintaining the production
   network computers, thin-clients, printers, PLCs, and Linux servers. I also
   deployed a Linux-based VoIP and Fax server using Asterisk to help replace
   parts of their ancient analog phone system that was costing thousands of
   dollars in contracting fees every month. Phones were replaced as analog pairs
   degraded or were cut during various construction / demolition projects.
 * Three government agencies in one building, each with their own unique
   requirements and an extremely limited budgets. I designed and implemented
   several low-cost solutions including replacing 4 old virus-infested public
   access computers running Windows 2000 in their library with 12 thin clients
   in a Linux Terminal Services Project environment for several thousand dollars
   less than the comparable Windows solution. For over 3 years, my monthly
   maintenance in their Library consisted of asking if there were any problems,
   being told "no, things are running perfectly", and then returning to my
   office with an upgrade to a newer release every 6-8 months.
 * A multi-site government network with 4 locations that required network
   connectivity to their vehicles. I replaced a cellular routing appliance in
   each vehicle that did not perform to vendor-advertised standards with
   embedded Linux routers that communicated securely back to a central office so
   ambulances could access patient data and call information while en-route to
   911 calls. I also managed their virtual server farm, storage network, and
   their fiber backbone.




UBERTRAGEN

North Bonneville, WA
Co-owner
2005 - 2010

Ran a small web hosting provider involving a handful of Linux servers. Hosted
sites for clients, friends, and family. The project was an experiment to test
the security and automation capabilities of Linux in a production environment.


SKAMANIA COUNTY EMS

Stevenson, WA
EMT-B
2001 - 2007

I volunteered from January 2001 until February of 2005, at which time I was
hired on part-time. In September 2005 I was brought on full-time. While on-duty,
I responded to 911 requests for assistance aboard an ALS ambulance and/or
technical rescue vehicle. Duties included providing patient care, teamwork,
critical thinking, disaster planning, problem solving, and rapidly changing
environments and command structures on emergency incidents. I also helped
maintain IT systems for the service.


INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR

Columbia River Gorge
Technician
1989 - 2007

Provided support on an on-call basis to numerous companies and individuals in
the Columbia River Gorge area, providing phone, e-mail, and on-site support for
a variety of Windows and Linux networks.


GORGE NETWORKS, INC.

Hood River, OR
Developer
9/1998 - 4/2003

I designed and developed web-based applications for customers and for internal
use. I designed and maintained the company intranet, including business
applications for tracking telephone circuit repair, installation of new
services, and interfaces for support personnel to monitor various network device
logs relating to customer accounts.

I was regularly tasked with installing and configuring new hosting servers and
co-location machines in addition to new employee workstations. I was on-call
24/7 to support critical infrastructure that kept an average of 1,000 users
online at any one time.


PROFESSIONAL SKILLS


TOP SKILLS

90%

PYTHON & DJANGO

Expert, 15 years
I have designed many internal and several external applications writtein in
Python using the Django Framework to enable users to easily access account and
customer data, access statistics and reports, and even as a front-end
replacement for an old out-of-date proprietary ticketing system.
76%

JAVASCRIPT / NODE.JS

Experienced, 5 years
I have written a suite of internal tools that are used to connect customer
systems to reporting back-ends by way of several transport technologies
including SSH channels, WebSockets, and JSON APIs.
95%

LINUX

Advanced, 25 years
Designed and built Linux storage and virtualization systems to ensure data
integrity, uptime, data security, and ease of management.
85%

AUTOMATION

Expert, 15 years
Used automation in various forms to manage several hundred Linux, BSD, and
Windows servers across multiple organizations. I started by writing Bash and
Python scripts years ago, then used templating and cloning, and finally settled
in to using Puppet for the last ~6 years. Very recently I have started migrating
from Puppet to Salt to overcome certain limitations with Puppet.
93%

NETWORK AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Advanced, 22 years
Every since I was a kid in the days of dialup bulletin boards I have been
involved in networks and infrastructure. Everything from running my own mail
server, firewall and IDS to working at in internet provider working with
expensive Cisco routers and switches. One project I had fun building was
OpenMesher where I automated deployment of a mesh network between corporate
offices by generating Debian packages to configure OpenVPN, Quagga, and
Shorewall on our edge routers.
50%

WINDOWS DEVELOPMENT

Familiar, 25 years
While Windows is my least-favorite platform to work with, I have occasionally
worked on projects over the last few decades in Visual Basic and C#. A recent
data collection project has me heavily involved in VB.NET and C#.


OTHER SKILLS

Python Django Node.js websockets C# VB.NET Linux FreeBSD Windows HAProxy Bash
Nginx Apache Elasticsearch Docker Docker Swarm Vagrant pfSense iptables
Shorewall KVM/Qemu vSphere VoIP Icinga/Nagios Munin RANCID Smokeping MRTG SNMP
Haraka Postfix Dovecot POP3 IMAP SMTP LMTP Puppet Salt Asterisk HTML5 CSS3 Git
PHP ejabberd BIND PowerDNS TCP/IP Routing Subnetting VLANs RIP OLSR OSPF Spam
filtering ZFS Load Balancing Anycast Failover


PORTFOLIO





OPENMESHER

Build dpkg files to automate deploying an OpenVPN mesh with RIP routing to your
routers
View on Github




STATUSPAGE

A simple easy-to-deploy status page for your clients with caching and a
user-friendly interface
View on Github




HARAKA

User and frequent contributor to Haraka: An event driven SMTP server in node.js
View on Github




GAME

Something similar to the Land of Devastation BBS door game from the early 90s
View on Github


ABOUT ME

I have a passion for solving problems through software development and
automation. This saves time, reduces costs, reduces errors, and frees people up
to take on new and interesting challenges.

I specialize in network design, and automation. In my free time, I created a
solution called "Practice in a Box" that my employer decided to use and sell to
medical companies to meet the needs of their rapid expansion from a handfull of
offices to tens of offices across in each of multiple states. The solution
employed routing and firewalling, virtualization of the internal servers,
on-disk encryption for patient data as well as encrypted off-site backups. A
wireless solution was packaged wih the solution as well as switching equipment,
file synchronization, cryptolocker prevention and alerting, remote support
tools, and even monitoring and alerting for all the equipment, services, and
business processes. The initial test build took 30 days to complete. After
working diligently to automate the configuration, I was able to reduce the build
time to approximately 16 hours.

Most of my activities are largely unsupervised with occasional meetings. I work
to understand the vision and mission of my employer and strive to ensure I am
constantly working towards those goals.

I am experienced with monitoring ticket queues for engineering issues to
detect/fix problems with minimal or no input from management and minimal impact
to our clients. I am comfortable with shit work and have worked always-on-call
schedules. I have been the point-of-contact for any low-level network issues
involving routing, VLANs, VPNs, troubleshooting various protocol issues, and I
also manage the company hosting infrastructure.

For my other employer, I work as a developer on a variety of products designed
to enable managed service providers to remotely support and manage their client
networks. I primarily work with Django and Node.js using various technologies
like Redis, Postgres, Elasticsearch, HAProxy, Docker, and Vagrant in Linux and
FreeBSD. On the Windows site, I have to write tools in VB.NET with some C#.

My passion for automation and software development comes from working for Gorge
Networks. While I was there I became frustrated with their sign-up process. It
consisted of gathering customer information over the phone and then emailing it
to our billing department. Technicians would sometimes forget a necessary piece
of information which would require us to call the customer back. Our billing
department would input the information into our billing system, bill the credit
card, and then print several copies of a 'new user report' at 5 PM. Users who
signed up after 5 PM usually had to wait until the next evening at 5 PM to get
started. The 'new user' report would be given to several technicians who would
each pick one of several systems on our network (like our mail server, RADIUS
server, web hosting server, etc...) and start entering new customer data. The
process was fraught with the possibility of errors. Typos could cause
significant frustration for a customer.

Customers were told throughout the day to try connecting after 6 PM and to call
us back if there were any problems. Unfortunately we stopped answering the
phones around 6 PM, and customers were left frustrated and were prone to playing
with their settings in an attempt to try to fix the problem. This would usually
cause more work for our support staff in the morning.

I spent several months working between phone calls and after-hours to automate
the sign-up process, and finally built a set of web forms, and a CD that could
be handed out at local stores in our service area that would walk customers or
our technicians through gathering all the required information. The data would
then be validated by our servers, the customer credit card would be
automatically charged, and then the scripts would automate creating accounts in
all the various systems and databases. Finally, the CD would automatically
configure the customer computer properly and allow them to connect. This would
all occur over the span of about 45 seconds.

This new system reduced the number of support calls we received, reduced user
frustration, and freed up staff at the end of the day by no longer requiring
them to spend time manually entering and verifying account data in multiple
disparate systems.

In my spare time I research and develop custom applications for companies, play
with new technologies, and I try to better myself and my knowledge of every
aspect of IT. When I am not working, I love hanging out with my family, working
on my farm, and helping my community.


GET IN TOUCH

I am currently happily employed, doing what I love, but I am always open to
interesting projects and new challenges.

Feel free to contact me by e-mail at aaron@heyaaron.com or phone at 360-200-1742

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Aaron C. de Bruyn