Adam Hawkins, Developer in Honolulu, HI, United States
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Adam Hawkins

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Honolulu, HI, United States
Toptal Member Since
August 28, 2018

Adam’s spent over eight years building products, growing teams, and setting engineering practices. His primary goal in every project is to accelerate the team's delivery and increase quality via SDLC using DevOps principles and practices such as continuous delivery. Technical-wise, his strongest area is back-end services and architecture but has wide-ranging experience moving up the stack to web apps and down the stack into system deployment.

Portfolio

Semaphore CI
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Packer, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker
Cloud Academy
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Serverless...
Saltside (India)
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Helm, Kubernetes, JavaScript, Bash, Apache Thrift...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Terminal, MacOS

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on was rearchitecting an entire product and bootstrapping a new engineering team abroad.

Work Experience

Technical Writer

2016 - PRESENT
Semaphore CI
  • Authored a tutorial on continuous deployment (CD) with Docker.
  • Wrote tutorials on infrastructure automation with Ansible.
  • Created a tutorial on continuous deployment (CD) with AWS.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Packer, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker

Instructor and Technical Writer

2016 - PRESENT
Cloud Academy
  • Created several video courses: Introduction to Kubernetes, Introduction to Docker, AWS Best Practices, and Serverless Survey.
  • Hosted webinars on DevOps and containers.
  • Wrote blog posts on DevOps, Kubernetes, and Docker.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Serverless, Kubernetes, Docker

SRE Team Lead

2015 - 2017
Saltside (India)
  • Interviewed, hired, and trained engineers for a new engineering office in Bangalore.
  • Taught TDD, system design, architecture, distributed system basics, and telemetry basics to a new group of engineers.
  • Migrated from home-grown container orchestration to Helm-based deployments.
  • Integrated ChatOps for on-demand topic branch review environments.
  • Dropped the monthly AWS cost by 30% using a variety of cost cutting and tracking measures.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Helm, Kubernetes, JavaScript, Bash, Apache Thrift, Docker, Ruby

Platform Team Lead

2013 - 2015
Saltside (Sweden)
  • Built and launched a payment collection service.
  • Led the architectural rewrite from a monolith to SoA/microservices.
  • Led the complete back-end rewrite for product version 2.
  • Led the transition from golden images to Docker.
  • Created a distributable application sandbox for use by mobile, web, and QE team members.
  • Designed and set practices for real-time contract validation and system design guidelines.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Thrift, Docker, JavaScript, Ruby

Lead Developer

2011 - 2014
Radium CRM
  • Built, test, and developed an MVP using Ruby on Rails.
  • Separated the architecture into front-end and back-end tiers.
  • Built an initial Ember.js prototype application.
  • Participated in customer calls and helped develop product requirements.
Technologies: Ember.js, PostgreSQL, Heroku, Sinatra, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Who's Hiring?

An app that converts Hacker News "Who's Hiring Threads?" into an RSS feed. It is a simple Ruby application covered by tests and deployed to Heroku—nothing fancy, but certainly useful!

Introduction to Ansible (Tutorial)

https://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/introduction-to-ansible
Learn about Ansible features and how Ansible fits with Chef and Puppet and see some technical examples of configuration management and workflow automation.

Continuous Deployment with Google Container Engine and Kubernetes (Tutorial)

https://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/continuous-deployment-with-google-container-engine-and-kubernetes
Learn how to deploy an application to Kubernetes with Google Container Engine and how to set up continuous deployment for it using Semaphore.

Continuous Deployment of Golden Images with Packer and Semaphore (Tutorial)

http://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/continuous-deployment-of-golden-images-with-packer-and-semaphore
Learn how to use Packer to build an AWS AMI (Amazon Machine Image), configure it to run a Docker image, and continuously deploy the application using Semaphore.

Continuous Deployment for Static Sites with Docker, AWS, and Ansible (Tutorial)

https://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/continuous-deployment-for-static-sites-with-docker-aws-and-ansible
Leverage the power of Middleman, Docker, AWS, and Ansible to build a continuous deployment system for your static site.

Continuous Deployment with Docker, AWS, and Ansible (Tutorial)

https://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/continuous-deployment-with-docker-aws-and-ansible
Use continuous deployment with Docker, Ansible, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk to take a greenfield project from the initial commit all the way to production.

Legacy Rails Q&A Michael Feathers, Adam Hawkins, Andrzej Krzywda (Panel)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csiK5GCcjt8
A video discussion and panel from Wroclove.rb 2014.

Application Architecture: Boundaries, Object Roles, and Patterns (Talk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u2w57QBIkU&list=PLoGBNJiQoqRCYNOfsPoxVWChbT5x5D5WP&index=7
A talk at Wroclove.rb 2014 on Hexagonal Architecture.

Production Ready Ruby (Talk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpq1PoAzOQ&
A talk at RubyConf India 2017 on telemetry and other practices.

Shipping Code at Saltside: Two Years on Docker (Talk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcOx21_e6fA
A presentation at DevOps Days 2016 in Bangalore discussing what it's like to build and develop an application using Docker with notes on what comes next.

Building Saltside's Helm Chart (Post)

Push Helm’s limits to build preconfigured production/staging charts.

Serverless Survey (Video Course)

https://cloudacademy.com/cloud-computing/survey-of-serverless-across-the-cloud-course/
Learn similarities and differences between AWS, GCP, and Azure serverless functions with this Survey of Serverless Across the Cloud course.

Getting Started with AWS: Real World Practices (Video Course)

https://cloudacademy.com/amazon-web-services/getting-started-with-an-amazon-web-services-solution-real-world-practices-course/
This video course the AWS landscape and teach what you need to know to build application on AWS. It's effectively a course on AWS best practices for beginning/intermediate AWS users.

Introduction to Kubernetes (Video Course)

https://cloudacademy.com/cloud-computing/introduction-to-kubernetes-course/
With containers being a common tool to bundle applications, managing containers is key. Introduction to Kubernetes looks at getting containers under control.

Introduction to Docker (Video Course)

https://cloudacademy.com/cloud-computing/introduction-to-docker-course/
This was my first video course. It's an introductory course that leads into deployment options (such as Kubernetes).

TeamCI

My own Sass project for testing team code against shared coding standards; built with Ruby, Docker, and a generous amount of Bash.

Languages

Bash, Ruby, JavaScript

Frameworks

Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby on Rails 3, Sinatra, Serverless Framework, Ember.js, Express.js, Apache Thrift

Libraries/APIs

Ruby on Rails API

Tools

Vagrant, AWS CloudFormation, Docker Compose, Packer, Ansible, Cucumber, Terminal, Helm, Puppet, Chef

Paradigms

Continuous Delivery (CD), Test-driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), DevOps, Continuous Deployment, Serverless Architecture, Automation

Platforms

Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, MacOS, Heroku, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Storage

Redis, MongoDB, NoSQL, JSON/XML Schemas, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Memcached

Other

Kubernetes Operations (kOps), Serverless

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