David Dee, Developer in Highlands Ranch, CO, United States
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David Dee

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) Developer

Location
Highlands Ranch, CO, United States
Toptal Member Since
September 10, 2018

David has 28 years of experience working in IT, with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, anti-abuse, and internet services industry. A strong engineering professional, skilled in Red Hat/CentOS Linux, Perl Automation, and PHP, he is certain to be an asset to any initiative.

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

RHEL, CentOS, PHP, Bash, Perl

The most amazing...

...thing I've coded is a set of programs that monitor my home's perimeter and can control some lights and appliances (e.g., TV channels or music sources).

Work Experience

Lead Engineer

2001 - 2018
CenturyLink (formerly Qwest Communications)
  • Supported the Internet Security Services team, aka Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) Enforcement team, for 13 years, Responsible for the system architecture, software design, implementation and support for the team.
  • Anticipated, designed, and implemented automation needs.
  • Coordinated with peer teams to ensure that best practices and security requirements of the AUP Enforcement team are represented in peer team activities and new product implementation.
  • Worked with customer-facing teams to develop automation to support customer identification and notification, malware mitigation, and other AUP-related efforts.
  • Developed two Perl-based automation systems to identify and notify customers of their malware, vulnerability or email issues.
  • Built a customizable web-based database table management framework in PHP that we use in many of our subsystems.
  • Created a metric reporting system in PHP and Perl, enabling both on-demand and pre-staged query results viewable on the web as well as exportable to Excel.
  • Implemented automation for a class-based system to build and manage ongoing configurations of our RHEL 6 and 7 machines (functionality similar to “Puppet” or “Chef”). A flexible “Kickstart” PHP script enables rapid build or rebuild of systems, and a complex Bash script maintains their ongoing configurations.
  • Developed a DMARC management and report monitoring framework with a PHP management GUI, a Perl back-end for monitoring DNS configuration and ingesting nightly DMARC Reports, and Elasticsearch for querying the report data.
  • Supported the Intrusion Detection (IDS) and the IP Engineering teams with development and system administration responsibilities.
  • Implemented and maintained system monitoring using NAGIOS.
  • Implemented a web-based intrusion detection system (IDS) log review system.
  • Designed and implemented a web-based network scan-management tool that was in use for 11 years.
Technologies: Bash, HTML, PHP, Perl, CentOS, Red Hat Linux

Information Technology Manager, Senior Unix Admin

2000 - 2001
BizBlast.com
  • Managed IT initiatives and oversaw system administration.
Technologies: PHP, Perl, Red Hat Linux

Info Systems Operations Manager, Senior Unix Administrator

1999 - 2000
TRIP.com
  • Managed the IS team.
  • Administered the Unix systems.
Technologies: Linux, Solaris

Software Engineer

1998 - 1999
GTE Internetworking
  • Supported development of a RADIUS access control system.
Technologies: HTML, Adobe ColdFusion

System Admin, Systems/Network Engineer

1990 - 1998
Computer Sciences Corporation
  • Handled systems administration and contributed to the development and maintenance of systems and networks.
Technologies: Linux, Perl, HTML

Home Control Suite of Systems

I've developed Perl code with associated modules to control and monitor my Insteon lights and sensors, Sonos music players, Sony Amplifier, TV, and TiVo via command line. Comms are done via Infrared, REST, SOAP, and UPNP. Status is coordinated via MQTT. I also developed a related system that communicates status and receives commands via XMPP and SMS. Lastly, a related web "dashboard" captures the status of all (most) devices and can control the lights.
1991 - 1997

Master of Science Degree in Computer Science

Johns Hopkins University - Columbia, MD

1985 - 1990

Bachelor of Science Degree in Information & Computer Science

Georgia Institute of Technology - Atlanta, GA

APRIL 2009 - APRIL 2019

Red Hat Certified Engineer #110-399-607

Red Hat

Libraries/APIs

libvirt

Tools

Nagios, Adobe ColdFusion, Git, Apache, MQTT

Languages

Bash, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, HTML

Platforms

CentOS 6, Linux CentOS 7, Linux RHEL/CentOS, CentOS, Red Hat Linux, Solaris, Linux

Storage

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL 10

Other

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), RHEL, Mosquitto

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