Michael Hale             

524 Lee Street · Holly Springs, NC 27540 · 919.961.7171 · mike@hales.ws

 

 

Experienced system administrator and software developer with a passion for open source software and excellent creative problem solving skills based on 10 years of cross-platform administration, 10 years of OO application development with various languages and 14 years of website development. Proven capability to organize projects, learn quickly and see the “right answer” for the problem at hand.

 

Selected Work Achievements

 

System Administration

As a system administrator in challenging, often chaotic consulting environments for companies ranging from small startups to the Fortune 500, I:

 

·  Wrote chef cookbooks and used the knife tool to manage hundreds of production systems on EC2;

·  Participated in a 24x7 on call rotation to support production systems;

·  Supported key customers by helping to migrate Terabytes of data to new systems;

·  Designed, configured and maintained the mixed MS/Linux network (file servers, firewalls, wireless, etc.) for a software development company with up to 10 mobile software developers at client sites;

·  Completely retooled the C/C++ build process for the IPsec appliance of a networking products startup, to reduce build time from 1-2 hours to 5-10 minutes;

·  Organized and implemented a VPN-accessible Samba system and phone network for a healthcare startup with 10 employees in the field, and provided on-call tech support for the entire workforce.

 

What you’re getting:

A system administrator who can learn quickly, recommend solutions, and add value to your business, not just play with technology. I can add those skills to your team right away.

 

Creative Problem Solving

As a system administrator, Extreme Programming software developer and website developer, I:

 

·  Replaced the slow, error prone, manual process of launching EC2 instances with a multi-threaded ruby script;

·  Configured nagios to relay critical notifications through pagerduty, and to prefer engineers currently awake;

·  Helped reduce AWS operating costs by discovering extra resources using the fog library and rake scripts;

·  Provided strategic technical analysis for a Debian Linux-based SSL-VPN appliance product offering produced by developers in India for an RTP networking startup;

·  Developed an automated Ruby on Rails server configuration procedure based on custom tools I created to work with the chef configuration library (http://www.github.com/mikehale/drive-thru);

·  Implemented an innovative release procedure for a Christian publishing company to speed up deployment and increase accuracy (using Ant scripts to automate previously manual procedures and reduce deployment time);

·  Designed and developed the Java back end and browser front end for a Christian publisher’s website;

·  Used Python and TurboGears to build an app that enables a user to manage Subversion access files;

·  Actively contributed to the open source Java on Sails project, including designing and implementing the HTTP download component using the Java Servlet API, and automating project builds with Ant, Maven, and Continuum.

 

What you’re getting:

A system administrator with proven coding skills who can innovate to help your team become more agile, while reducing your costs through automation.

 

Technical Skills

Operating Systems — Linux (Debian, Ubuntu), OS X (Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Snow Leopard), Windows (NT, XP)

Network Services — DNS, Samba, NFS, OpenVPN

Cloud Services — EC2, S3, RDS

Programming Languages — Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Java J2SE/J2EE, JavaScript/AJAX, Python, PHP, Perl 5, ASP.Net, C#

Tools — Automation Tools (Chef, Rake, Capistrano, Ant), Continuous Build Tools (Continuum, AntHill, CruiseControl), Testing Tools (Cucumber, test/unit, JUnit, HttpUnit, JSUnit), Version Control Systems (Git, Subversion, CVS, ClearCase), Databases (Riak, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server)

 

Employment History

Infrastructure Developer, Sonian, Inc. Holly Springs, NC (07/2010 - Present)

Software Developer/System Administrator, Hale The Geek, LLC. Holly Springs, NC (02/2005 - 07/2010)

Linux Expert, Buildmeister, CipherOptics, Inc., Raleigh, NC (10/2003 – 02/2005)

Software Developer/Webmaster/System Administrator, RoleModel Software, Inc. (07/2000 – 10/2003)

Webmaster, Aaims Property Management, Fayetteville, NC (06/1996 – 10/2001)

 

Education

A.S. in Computer Programming (with Honors), Fayetteville Technical Community College (2001)

RoleModel Software Apprenticeship (2000-2003)