profile




Profile for Upayavira

  • Software developer and capable systems automation engineer

  • Experienced with Java development, working with Java based web frameworks and back-end systems and associated technologies

  • Experienced with Unix System administration and automation (Python, Perl, bash, virtualisation)

  • Flexible individual – prepared to take on work in new areas, used to responding to the needs of the team/employer

  • Long standing involvement in Open Source – a Member of the Apache Software Foundation, including open source coding, and mentoring projects

Background

I am a software developer with twenty years of Unix experience. My unix background allows me to work in system administration roles, typically focusing on automation. I have also worked in architectural roles as well as pure software development.

I have substantial experience of open source software development. Initially with Apache Cocoon, then working with and learning huge amounts from the Apache Infrastructure team. Since then, I've successfully mentored three projects through incubation.

I have been a Buddhist for 20 years, and a member of the Western Buddhist Order for the last 10. I was given the name 'Upayavira' on ordination, which means 'he who finds creative ways to help others'.

Skills

Languages:

Python, Java, shell, Perl, XSLT, XML, Javascript, HTML/CSS, PHP, c, c++, etc

Environments:

Linux: various RedHat OSes (including RHEL5), Ubuntu since Hardy, some Solaris experience, Microsoft Windows as desktop and server

Example Tasks Recently Undertaken

  • Established virtualized QA environment (duplicate of production environment). This involved automated duplication of a 60Gb mysql database, solr indexes and snapshotting a 9Tb file system repository, all triggered with a single command. This task almost halved our hosting costs.

  • Built a system to manage virtual hosts, both instantiating them (configuring CPU count, memory, etc) and configuring the hosts when started. Automatically configured a wide range of applications (e.g. cron, nagios, logrotate, httpd, tomcat, solr, mysql, nfs, sudo, vsftpd, subversion, wikis, etc). The result was the ability to have a new host accepting web requests within 1½ minutes.

  • Rebuilt build system and created tooling to deploy applications across our server farm. This also supported minor live patching whilst maintaining a complete source code history, to be able to support a short release cycle (weekly releases)

  • Undertook major project to migrate production system between data centres across the continent, with minimal downtime (80 servers and 2Tb of data at that time)

  • Migrated search system from 16 servers running Autonomy to six servers running a sharded/ mirrored Apache SOLR, vastly improving stability and performance

  • Produced internal dashboard to integrate host status information (derived from Nagios) with actions such as restarting machines/applications and to power up/down VMs

  • Re-architected  content integration system as a pipelined componentized content ingestion engine

  • Implementing modules for Drupal in PHP to integrate the companies information into Drupal based sites (e.g. sidebar for Buddhist news on this page)

Involvement in Apache Software Foundation

  • Member of the ASF since 2005. Committer to Apache Cocoon since 2003/4

  • Mentored Apache Shindig, Apache Felix and Apache Wicket through the incubator to become fully fledged Apache projects, currently mentoring Apache Thrift

  • A member and participant in the Apache Infrastructure team

  • Built the CocoonBean, allowing Cocoon to be integrated into other Java applications, and wrapped enhanced command line interface around it

Previous Achievements (pre-2005)

Built interactive Underground map and real time map, fed from live data feed from London Underground control rooms. Current version of the interactive map is at http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/im/SI-T.html, and the real time map is at http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/im/RD-T.html.