My Toolbox

I've used a lot of great tools in my career, and this is not an exhaustive list. Unfortunately, I cannot list every tool that I have used. This is a very short list of some of my favorites.

I have been using Linux as my preferred OS for quite a while. I've earned certifications as an RCHE twice. Although I'm comfortable working with any Linux distribution, my preferred distributions are Fedora, Ubuntu, and AlmaLinux. Linux is basically the foundation for the majority of the work that I do. My strong Linux knowledge is the foundation for my work in various Kubernetes platforms. I have experience with vanilla Kubernetes, RedHat OpenShift, AWS EKS, and Azure AKS.

Git is a foundation DevOps tool. It is a great tool for pulling down the latest version of many common apps during the initial build phase. I'm also very familiar with GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket, which are all common cloud versions of the famous command line too.

I am strong believer in automation, and I have experience with several automation platforms. Most of my time recently is in Terraform. I have also used Ansible and Chef. I also became a SaltStack Certified Engineer and used Salt Open in a globally managed environment, but the Salt Project never really gained traction like other tools.

Observability platforms are almost always organically grown within an environment. From an enterprise observability perspective, I have extensive experience with several major enterprise observability platforms including Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace. I also have experience with logging platforms such as Splunk, ELK, and Graylog. I have also implemented other open source tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.

From a personal perspective, most of my recent code is Python. I usually have a personal development project going. I am currently building and maintaining a digital twin to manage my online presence. The code bases for my work projects have varied from role to role. Sometimes it's Python, Ruby, or Golang. Occassionally it's a Javascript framework like React or Angular. I am not an app developer by trade, but I can build and deploy an app without issues. I would consider most of what I build to be microservices, nanoservices, or integrations. I am also comfortable with PHP and Perl, but I have not used those on a regular basis lately.

I really like several tools in the Atlassian stable. I have extensive experience configuring and managing Jira and Confluence. I have Jira admin for several of my professional roles, and I am usually identified as a Jira champion. I also have some time with Monday and Asana.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not an exhaustive list. This page would be very long if I mentioned very open source app, database, and tool that I have deployed and supported. If you are curious about my experience with a particular tool, please reach out.