Danny B
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Danny is a DevOps generalist with deep real-life experience in most major tools and frameworks in his field. His passion is tackling any unautomated or under-automated process that takes away from your team's happiness and productivity—allowing the company to focus on its core competencies—not on the infrastructure.
Portfolio
Availability
Preferred Environment
Atom, Git, Ubuntu Linux
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on was dockerizing a large real-time ad bidding platform, moving it to AWS, and reducing the latency in a European and Asian expansion.
Work Experience
Founder | CTO
Hive Collective
- Delivered outstanding solutions to my clients' DevOps challenges by bringing our deeply experienced infrastructure veterans to work on the problems of promising early-stage and mature teams.
- Assembled and led what I consider to be the best team in the industry; they're ambitious yet genial, smart and ever-curious, and united by a common vision.
- Developed a company-wide focus of always creating value using technology rather than technology for its own sake.
DevOps Lead
Dataquest
- Introduced Terraform to the company's tech stack and migrated provisioning of all cloud resources to it.
- Spearheaded a massive cost-cutting effort that reduced the cloud bill by 30%. Part of the savings was in consolidating AWS EKS workloads into GKE, which required extensive zero-downtime cloud migrations.
- Implemented deep visibility into the stack via Prometheus and Grafana, including anomaly detection.
DevOps Lead
ThoughtLeadr
- Containerized the entire infrastructure of this advertising platform whose combined publisher base sees over 200 million unique visitors per month in the US alone.
- Redesigned the Jenkins-based continuous deployment system from the ground up to be able to autonomously create and destroy build pipelines and independent staging environments to match feature branches in Git.
- Migrated all infrastructure scripts to a modular Terraform codebase targeting multiple AWS regions.
- Put in place extensive visibility into operations, code, and key business performance indicators using the ELK stack and Prometheus and Grafana.
- Mentored the team on the benefits and best practices of Docker and worked closely with them to automate repetitive processes and generally streamline development workflows.
DevOps Lead
Gradient Labs
- Evolved a bleeding-edge microservices architecture to respond to the needs of the client companies of this technology and design consultancy, including managing all server infrastructure for the popular eLearning platform, Zulama.com.
- Retained total ownership of the entire staging and production infrastructure stacks for all the clients; also migrated live servers across AWS regions and implemented a server consolidation initiative.
- Acted as the primary technical advisor to the founder along with responsibilities far beyond DevOps including hiring development staff, managing developers on various sub-projects, Excel-cost projections, and researching and implementing various sweeping technical initiatives.
Manager of Software Development
CAST Software
- Oversaw and facilitated all software development activity throughout the company, managing a cross-disciplinary team of software engineers working on two software products and one software/hardware project.
- Assigned department resources to projects, evaluated code quality, and monitored the deliverables of each team to ensure milestone and on-budget completion.
- Worked closely with the executive team, product management, quality assurance, and the sales and marketing arms of the company to communicate and collaborate on project requirements, timelines, and resources.
- Hired and onboarded new software developers.
- Managed off-site/telecommuting and contract employees and mentored and supervised multiple college interns.
- Migrated the department to new development tools, including Visual Studio 2008 and Subversion.
Experience
High-performance Prometheus Exporter
https://github.com/hiveco/conntrack_exporterCut AWS Cloud Costs by ~200%
https://i.imgur.com/CfZ0Sb6.pngAdvanced Server Monitoring and Alerting System
https://i.imgur.com/hmgTpws.pngDevOps, Continuous Deployment Process, and Security
http://zulama.com/Skills
Languages
Bash, Python, PHP, C++
Libraries/APIs
Jenkins Pipeline, Jenkins Job DSL, Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)
Tools
Helm, ELK (Elastic Stack), Packer, Logstash, Jenkins, Git, NGINX, Zabbix, Terraform, Grafana, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Subversion (SVN), Nagios, Puppet, Ansible, Atom, Microsoft Visual C++, InstallShield, Bazel
Paradigms
Microservices Architecture, Automation
Platforms
Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), New Relic, CoreOS, Azure, Ubuntu, Cloud Native, Ubuntu Linux
Storage
MySQL, Distributed Databases, Elasticsearch, Riak
Other
Infrastructure Monitoring, Technology Strategy & Architecture, Prometheus, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), 12 Factor, GitFlow, IBM SoftLayer
Frameworks
Selenium, Zend Framework, Flask, Windows PowerShell
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
York University - Toronto, Canada
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring