Bill Wiens
bill@billwiens.com
503.689.3803
Seattle, WA 98102
Summary
I’m an experienced software engineer who loves open-source technology. I have a vast well of experience running and supporting web applications in production. I design for reliability and efficiency with my skills in automation, deployment, monitoring, and cloud computing.
Experience
Mar 2015 - Present: DevOps Engineer at LiquidPlanner
- Migrated the LiquidPlanner platform to AWS: defined implementation strategy, built out tooling and infrastructure, and guided the project from inception to production.
- Responsible for the 24x7x365 performance and availability of our Ruby on Rails web application. Performed full stack troubleshooting and analysis of production issues.
- Defined operations culture at LiquidPlanner. Managed the on-call rotation and trained engineers on incident response.
- Transitioned configuration management from Puppet to Ansible. Managed infrastructure with Terraform.
- Developed a layered security policy for LiquidPlanner. Ran day-to-day security operations, including applying critical patches and triaging security alerts.
May 2012 – Sept 2014: DevOps Engineer at Smashing Ideas
- Worked with internal developers and client operations staff to provision infrastructure and enable rapid deployment for Python and PHP web applications and services.
- Used both Puppet and Chef to manage CentOS and Ubuntu servers, including physical servers and those virtualized in the cloud (AWS, Rackspace).
- Completed performance analyses to find bottlenecks and advised on/implemented fixes.
- Acted in a “firefighter” role to debug and fix unexpected system issues.
- Used a variety of monitoring and analytics tools (Nagios, Munin, Boundary, New Relic).
- Introduced the use of Vagrant to create disposable development environments and Jenkins for build automation.
August 2010 – May 2012: Developer at Smashing Ideas
- Administered a platform of 70+ international Drupal sites and led a team to overhaul and maintain them.
- Led initiatives to add Varnish, Memcached, and a CDN to our infrastructure.
- Trained new developers.
- Developed and documented process for tracking, testing, and deploying bug fixes and new features.
- Acted as a security liaison and provided a quick turnaround on critical security issues.
Sept 2009 – July 2010: Web Developer at Freelock Computing
- Developed web applications using the Drupal CMS.
- Focused on agile development using close collaboration with clients.
- Wrote custom PHP modules, used JavaScript and jQuery to create dynamic experiences, wrote custom SQL queries.
Feb 2009 – Sept 2009: Linux System Administrator at Freelock Computing
- Administered Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux servers for Freelock and clients.
- Performed maintenance and deployment of Drupal websites.
- Took charge of an initiative to document and consolidate Freelock’s server infrastructure.
- Migrated internal services to a virtualized environment using VMware Server.
Technical Skills
- Capable of creating concise and elegant code in Python, PHP, and Ruby. Ran and debugged plenty of C and Go.
- Well-versed in tools and frameworks such as Django, Rails, Fabric, Capistrano, Terraform, Packer, and Vagrant.
- Confident in managing Linux systems with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet.
- Almost a decade of experience with CentOS and Ubuntu Linux.
- Extensive experience with Apache, Nginx, Redis, Memcached, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
- Expert with Git, Mercurial, and Subversion.
- Superb problem-solving skills in hardware and networking.
Education
- Willamette University in Salem, OR
- B.A., Computer Science — 2004–2008
- Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden
- Study abroad program — 2007
Interests
- Assembling and disassembling everything.
- The great outdoors.
- Games of all sorts.
- Collecting animated GIFs.
- Food, booze, and music.
- The intersection of technology and culture.