Employment :

• May 2002 to present (part time), also March 1993 to October 1997 (full time):
  'Systems Engineer' at Altair Engineering (and previously at 'Computational Mechanics Corporation' (COMCO), acquired by Altair in 1996.)
  From 1993 to 1997, I was in charge of installing and maintaining a heterogeneous network of mostly varied Unix systems, but with a few Windows and Macintosh machines as well. Duties included all aspects of installation and maintenance of these machines and the network that connects them to each other and the Internet, both software and hardware related -- backups, printing, desktop support, internet connectivity, firewalls, security, remote access, etc. Other duties included such tasks as hardware and software planning and budgeting, user education, and some software development.
  From 2002 to the present day, I am doing the same job, but on a part-time/as-needed basis -- covering most IT needs for the same office as before, but it is now a satellite office of a larger company. The environment is now mostly Linux, but with some Windows and MacOS machines.
• February 2000 - April 2023 (full time):
  'Escalations Engineer/Senior Customer Support Engineer/P4 Team Lead' at OpenText (and previously at Vignette, acquired by OpenText in 2009.)
  At OpenText my primary job (as of 2023) was providing technical support for the Web Experience Management (WEM), TeamSite, OpenText Directory Services (OTDS), Output Server and many of the other legacy Vignette products. I also did some development work for the WEM product, mostly fixing defects and releasing product patches.
  Other duties came to include:
  • Developing tools to integrate with our ticketing and defect tracking systems to add needed functionality that the base systems could not provide or did not provide well, such as source code access, data warehousing, information archival and rediscovery, monitoring and metrics.
  • Developing tools to automate installation, configuration and troubleshooting of Web Experience Management and other product installations to speed problem diagnosis, recreation and recovery.
  • Educating new hires, preparing them to also provide technical support for these products.
  • Acting as a project manager for a project to improve customer retention.
  • Some systems administration work managing the Linux and Windows systems used by Customer Support for problem recreations.
  • I also worked with the hosted installation/cloud team to assist them with automating aspects of their WEM installations to simplify administration, and helped the IT team with *nix issues.
• October 1997 - January 2000 : 'Senior Customer Support Engineer' at Tivoli (a subsidiary of IBM.)
  Primary duties include providing phone, email and occasional on-site support of Tivoli's TME 10 suite of enterprise management software, specifically of the Framework and T/EC (Tivoli Enterprise Console) products.
  Other duties included creating a data warehouse, metrics and notifications, and as a member of the 'process team', I helped to create and update the processes that helped make the Support organization work, and as a member of the 'Support technology team', I helped to mold the Support organization's future, specifically by pursuing and creating technologies that will help us to achieve our future goals.
• September 1992 to March 1993 : 'OS/2 SupportLine' Engineer at IBM.
  At IBM I was working as an on-site contractor (I was contracting for CSC, Computer Sciences Corporation) providing telephone and email support for IBM's OS/2 2.0/1.3/1.2 and IBM's OS/2 Lan Server and OS/2 Extended Services/Communications Manager.

Skills :

• Very familiar with the use, administration of and development under most versions of *nix. Specific *nix flavors that I am familiar with include: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and IRIX. Linux distributions used include Red Hat Enterprise, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu.
• Familiar with Windows and MacOS as well, both from user's and a system administrator's perspective.
• Work with these computer languages frequently: Perl, Bourne shell script ("Bash"), Java, Javascript.
• Very familiar with PC hardware and peripherals, and with many brands of *nix workstations and peripherals as well.
• Familiar with all aspects of networking as needed by a small to medium sized company-- switches, firewalls, VPNs, security monitoring, etc.
• Also familiar with these programs/software suites/technologies: VMware, Apache Tomcat, Apache httpd, Weblogic, JBoss, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, OpenGrok, Solr, mySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle database, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, rrdtool/mrtg, LDAP, NIS, Perforce, git, RCS, Zabbix, BackupPC, Jira.
• Familiar with (provided expert-level support for) these OpenText products: Web Experience Management (WEM), Portal, TeamSite, OutputServer and OpenText Directory Server (OTDS)

Education :

• Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin.
• Bachelor of Arts in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin.

References :

  Ian Archibald, 905-762-6062, OpenText, direct manager
  Nick Constant, OpenText, co-worker
  Starly Alley, OpenText, previous co-worker, previous manager