Dan Slimmon
dan@danslimmon.comProfessional Experience
Exosite: Senior Platform Engineer (May 2013 - present)
- Fully automated provisioning of Linode servers running high-availability Erlang application
Blue State Digital: Operations Team Manager (Sep. 2011 - Apr. 2013)
- Designed and built scalable infrastructures using Amazon EC2 auto-scaling groups and a pub/sub model with AMQP
- Managed a team of 4 ops engineers, encouraging an infrastructure-as-code approach and collaboration with software development teams
- Maintained 99.9% uptime of bulk email, web, and fundraising services
- Oversaw the design and implementation of an email infrastructure capable of sending up to 100 million messages per day at sustained rates of 15 million per hour, with bounce rates consistently under 1%
- Cultivated strong relationships with clients such as the It Gets Better Project and Obama For America through clear, direct communication
- Utilized and evangelized for statistical inference techniques as a decision-making tool
Blue State Digital: Senior Linux Administrator (2007 - 2011)
- Administrated over 100 CentOS servers, including physical machines, VMWare guests, and EC2 instances, running the LAMP stack
- Implemented Chef across entire infrastructure after evaluating a range of configuration management systems
- Led a small team in designing and coding a fault-tolerant web app for creating client accounts and managing their Apache and BIND configurations, targeted to a non-technical user base
- Managed terabyte-scale, mission-critical MySQL replicas
- Responded to system emergencies in an on-call rotation
- Coded heavily in Perl and Ruby
Personal Projects
- Empiricism Ops: Blog about reason, deduction, and inference in devops
- ServerTag: Web tool with an Elasticsearch backend for managing metadata about hosts
- Apachecrunch: Web log analysis tool designed for ease of use
- BTunes: Music server for our office based on MPD, with a sound effect daemon called LolD
Wesleyan University, Physics Dept.: Research Assistant (2004 - 2007)
- Adapted several large C programs for condensed-matter physical simulations
- Administrated an OpenMosix cluster under Debian Linux
Education
Wesleyan UniversityB.A. Physics and Mathematics, 2007