Kumar Damani's Homepage

Welcome!

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

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that guy who hosts his own website, email, dropbox, vpn, etc. Read - more.
a real stickler about 'oPtiMiZing mY woRkfLoW' by scripting anything script-able
a programming purist, and linguistic enthusiast
👎 down on social-media. I think they lead to dystopia. Read - more.
a B.Sc in Computer Science at the University of Toronto with a focus in Natural Language Processing -

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My Projects

My Homelab setup -
- My Ansible repository used for managing my self-hosted services.
- Source on GitLab
- Using: Ansible
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Namecheap CLI -
- A CLI application to list/add/update/remove DNS records from Namecheap.
- Source on GitLab
- Using: Go
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My dotfiles -
- My settings for common Linux tooling.
- Source on GitLab
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Helpthehome(less) -
- Project info page
- Source on GitLab
- Using: NodeJs, React-Native, MongoDB, Pug (jade)
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Solutions Repo -
- Project home page -
- Source on GitLab
- Using: NodeJs, MongoDB, Handlebars
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- If you've found something above useful, consider sending some Monero my way! - -

Work Experience

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- [2020 - now] -
Currently working as a DevOps Specialist at Kepler 🛰️. - This is a mostly software (infrastructure) dev gig for a start-up, which is a bit new for me - coming from a pure "DevOps" role for a mature company. There is a ton of specialized "space" - related equipment here that presents interesting problems. Beyond that, I've learned a ton about - embedded computers (RPis), networking and network automation, which has opened my world up to - cool home projects for which I am very grateful for. So far, I've been responsible for the - following:
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- Implementing a net-boot infrastructure using Packer, PXE, Awx (Ansible Tower) to keep our - RPi fleet OS images and configurations in-sync and up-to-date.
- Built a custom Linux router to support our lab's hardware testing requirements for on-demand - subnet generation/teardown, and Ansible roles for our managed switch inventory required our - ethernet related workloads.
- Completely revised our test-automation infrastructure by building a hardware-management - portal using Django with a RESTful Api (DRF) to facilitate reservation, as well as HITL (Hardware-in-the-loop) testing to allow us to more reliably, - and frequently test our HW.
- Designed and deployed a production-ready on-prem Kubernetes cluster to be our software - platform going forward, while facilitating the migration to Kubernetes for all pre-existing - workloads, including (but not limited to) our various distributed databases.
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Beyond my work as an Individual Contributor, I've also been responsible for instilling "DevOps" - principles within our team and projects on our road to maturity.
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- [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.
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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:
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- 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
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- 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. - -
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  - 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.
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- [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:
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- 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.
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[2014 - 2016]
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I've worked on several other small-buisness type projects involving web, and scripting over the - years in between semesters.
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Misc

The Programs and Equipment I use.

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Donation

XMR address: -

-                        42hFshxmNoFZfAkDJTjSx9MUruMHdLTiDTE4efpP7xZTYwHMjwDZ6eJea2EnyBGGr5ab81cAovBxxT6KSvpUY5roUdkP1Qj
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Kumar Damani

Last updated: 09 Sept. 2022

Welcome!

My Projects

Work Experience

Misc

Donation

Links: