Kumar Damani's Homepage

Last updated: 15 Jan. 2021

+ +

Welcome!

+ +

My name is Kumar. Many people call me 'kd', I'm known for being...

+ +

that guy who hosts his own website, email, and search engine.
a real stickler about 'oPtiMiZing mY woRkfLoW' by scripting anything script-able
a Programming purist, and Linguistic/languages enthusiast
anti social-networks. I think they are waste of time, and make ppl 😥
a B.Sc in Computer Science at the University of Toronto with a 'focus' in Natural Language Processing

+ +

My Projects

Helpthehome(less) +
- Source on GitLab
- Project info page
- Built with: NodeJs, React-Native, MongoDB, Pug (jade)
- Here is a sample merge request I made.
+
Solutions Repo +
- Source on GitLab
- Project home page
- Built with: NodeJs, MongoDB, Handlebars
+

+ +

Work Experience

+
+ [2020 - now] +
Currently working as a DevOps Specialist at Kepler 🛰️. All of our infrastructure is in-house and I'm working with a variery of interesting low-level HW - raspberry pis, RF Matrix etc., which is a totally new context for me, coming from k8s, ES world. There is so much specialized "space" related equipment here that it presents a great oppurtunity to develop and refine my skills. I am currenly the only "DevOps" guy here, but I've met a few people that arguably know the good stuff - GNU/Linux scaringly well. In fact, I usually feel like I know the least during most of my meetings... so I must be doing something right 🙂🤷.
+
+
+
+ [2019 - 2020] +
Worked as a DevOps Engineer at AcuityAds in Toronto. The main selling point for me to work here is that Acuity does not use Amazon or Google or MS (or whatever other 'cloud platform') to host its infrastructure, it has its own private Linux based 'cloud'. This presents a substantial set of challenges for us as DevOps Engineers that would normally be handled by a 3rd party provider.
+ +
Apart from this, due to the nature of adtech, we deal with a massive amount of data, which forces us to be very specific about the types of technologies we use. Here is a subset of what we use across multiple data-centers, often in multiple clusters:
+
- Infrastructure: VMWare, Physical
- Provisioning: Ansible, Terraform, Cobbler
- Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes
- CI/CD: Git, BitBucket, Bamboo (we host the entire Atlassian suite in-house)
- Monitoring: +
  - TICK (Telegraf, Influxdb, Chronograf, Kapacitor)
  - ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), with filebeat and metricbeat beats
  - Prometheus
  - Grafana
  - Nagios, Pagerduty, Pingdom
  +
- Data: MySql, Aerospike, Kafka, HDFS, Druid
- Scripting: Golang, Bash, Python. Some of my work can be on my Gitlab profile: +
  - Golang: +
    - a fast, containerized Cronjob that interacts with Druid, MySql, and Influxdb written in Go. Basic unit testing included. This is a job that powers one of our major alerting dashboards. +
    - a containerized highly modular Rest api that writes to Influxdb: . This is something we run in K8S as a Service to monitor Cronjobs that run in K8S. + +
    +
  - Python: a program to migrate Slack exports to MS Teams messages: . This is something we used when we gave up on Slack.
  - Bash: a small collection of helper scripts that I used frequently for random things.
  +
+
+
+
+ [2016 - 2017] +
I worked at Achiga formerly known as WebCanada as part of my PEY program from Uni for 12 months. As part of this, I was involved in:
+
- A fast paced Agile environment where I was a Full Stack Developer working with PHP (Zend), MySql, and JavaScript.
- Git + BitBucket + JIRA (basically the whole Atlassian suite), with Vagrant
- The Pipeline team working on day to day features and bugs in the CMS powering thousands of local hotel sites around the world for Starwood Hotels.
- Debugging and optimizing CRON jobs responsible for storing hotel rates in our database which is critical to hotel revenue.
- Contributing to the Gallery Page (CMS as well as user facing UI). See Design Hotels Gallery Page, towards the end of my tenure.
+
+
+
[2014 - 2016]
+
I've worked on several other small-buisness type projects involving web, and scripting over the years in between semesters.
+

+ +

Misc

The Programs and Equipment I use.

+ +

+ + +

+ +

Links:

+ +

Content: +
- + GitLab + Github +
Personal: +
- Email me
Downloadable Files: +
- Resume

+ +

Programs and Equipment

Software I Use

Priorities

I'm about getting things done quickly and having as little space between my thoughts and actions on the computer.

I like having vim-like bindings and prefer running programs in the terminal for simplicity's sake. That said, I'm very much against the cringey meme that things in the terminal are "cooler" or "nerdier" XD. Terminals are good for most tasks, but useless for others, for example, browsing the modern web (I admit this unfortunate fact with much consternation) or looking at maps. +

Terminal

I use st (simple terminal) by suckless.org, which is one of the most minimal, yet easily customizable terminal emulators out there. +I have my config read a pywal cached file which gives st its colors. +

+ +

Window Manager/Desktop Environment

+Primarily using bspwm. What I like is that its config file is just plain ol' Bash! No complaints with it. If you want to know why my computer looks the way it does, this is what to check out. +Occassionally I get irrationally anxious about my memory footprint, so I switch to DWM (again, from the suckless.org folks) only to switch back in a few weeks. +

+ +

Fonts

My monospace font is typically Inconsolata, my serif font in Linux Libertine and my sans font is Linux Biolinum. I have ttf-emojione for emojis as well and noto-fonts and noto-fonts-cjk to give me non-European scripts.

+ +

Status bar

polybar, but I eventually come to realize that it's mostly useless, so it stays hidden.

+ +

Text editing and programming

vim. Less of a text editor and more of a lifestyle. No, I'm not going to ever switch to emacs. I use the pywal plugin for colors.

+ +

Web browser

The web is bloat so they are all kinda terrible. I have tried, chrome, qutebrowser in the past. Right now I use Vivaldi with the add-on Vimium to get customizable vim-like keybindings. +

+ +

File manager

nnn. Yes, I have used ranger.

+ +

Mail client

mutt. Technically neo-mutt. I keep all my mail offline with offlineIMAP, gpg keys to store passwords.

+ +

Messaging

tox is what I recommend, but since it does not have an iOS client just yet, Signal will do. If you want to know why, see the section below about "Proprietary software".

+ +

Music/audio player

mpd with ncmpcpp for a library.

+ +

Video player

mpv. Don't bother with any other video player.

+ +

Writing documents

I used to write documents in LaTeX and compile them into pdf documents. Recently I've been experimenting with groff/troff to much success and recommend it as a much more minimal and elegant typesetting system, scarcely lacking anything you might need, although lacking documentation, so it'll probably be a jungle at first.

+ +

PDF viewer

zathura. I used mupdf, which is good too.

+ +

Image Viewer

sxiv (from suckless). Handles images, animated gifs, has additional thumbnail and slideshow modes and allows you to run custom scripts and read/write to standard input/output. Okay. This is epic.

+ +

Image modification

gimp for big things, but imagemagick commands for most little modifications, filter changes, trims, etc.

Hardware I Use

Laptop

The main laptop I use is a Thinkpad T420s, released in 2011. Old ThinkPads are designed for long term corporate use, and last forever and are made to be easy to repair and improve. They have many simple perks, like their uniquely tactile keyboards, their trackpoints and their ThinkLight (a more commonsense solution to lighting your keyboard at night). Newer ThinkPads are not as good, lacking the classical keyboards and generally being more Mac-like (unrepairable, breakable, and generally bad for an enormous price). +

Hard drives

SSDs are the only thing I recommend using a good bit of money on in your computer build. They make your computer hugely snappier and apparently use less power.

What I don't use

+ +

Proprietary software

I'm not going to endorse proprietary services that have gone out of their way to spy on or politically suppress their users, just as Facebook, or Discord. +One of the many potential take-aways you should get from me is that the use of libre/free software, by its nature, is more constructive and extensible—that's the point. There are philosophical reasons for this you'll run across in time, but for now, suffice it to say I will not endose the usage of proprietary software. +

Kumar Damani (https://kumardamani.xyz)