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About me

Hi. This is me: -

My name is Kumar. Some people call me kd, or ku-band-mar, I’m known for being…

that guy who hosts his own website, dropbox, search-engine etc. -DIY? Why?
a programming purist, and linguistic enthusiast.
👎 down on social-media. I think they lead to dystopia. Read more.
a B.Sc in CS. at U of T with a focus in NLP 😌

Projects

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Name	Active	Description	Tools
vps	yes	My Ansible repository for self-hosting.	Ansible
nccli	yes	A Docker-ized CLI for CRUD ops with Namecheap.	Go
nixdots	yes	My dotfiles for the Nix ecosystem.	Nix
dots	no	My dotfiles for general Linux home mgmt.	-

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If you found something above to be useful, consider sending a few coins my way!
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Professional Life

Treat this section as an extension of my resume.

2020 - now

Currently working as a DevOps at Kepler 🛰️. -This is mostly a software (infrastructure) dev gig for a start-up, which is a bit new to me -coming from a more traditional DevOps role with a mature company. -There is a ton of specialized space -related equipment here that present interesting problems in DevOps.

I’ve learned a ton about embedded computers, networking and network automation, -which has opened my world up to all sorts of home projects for which I am very grateful for. -So far, I’ve been responsible for the following:

Establishing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) as standard practice with Ansible.
Implementing a netboot infrastructure for our development servers - RPis - -using Packer, PXE, Awx (Ansible Tower) to keep them synced, predictable, and up-to-date.
Built a custom Linux router to support our unique hardware testing requirements -for on-demand subnet generation/teardown for isolated tests.
Automated our Lab network infrastructure with Ansible.
Devised a test-automation framework using Django to facilitate reservation, -as well as HIL -(Hardware-In-the-Loop) testing to allow us to more reliably, and frequently test our HW.
Designed and deployed our highly-available Kubernetes cluster to be our software -platform going forward.

Beyond my work as an Individual Contributor (IC), I’ve also been responsible for instilling DevOps -principles within the team on our journey to maturity.

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 -AWS, GCP or Azure etc. to host its infrastructure, it has its own on-prem ‘cloud’. -This presents substantial challenges for us as DevOps Engineers that would normally be handled by a -public cloud provider.

Apart from this, due to the nature of adtech, we deal with massive amounts of data, which forces -us to be very careful about the types of technologies we use (scale). -Here is a subset of what I’ve gained experience with during my time:

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 cron script -that interacts with Druid, MySql, and Influxdb written in Go. -Basic unit testing. -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 script 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 WebCanada) as -part of my PEY (internship) -program from U of T 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 cronjobs 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 website designing, -and scripting over the years in between semesters.

Donate

Monero (XMR)

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42hFshxmNoFZfAkDJTjSx9MUruMHdLTiDTE4efpP7xZTYwHMjwDZ6eJea2EnyBGGr5ab81cAovBxxT6KSvpUY5roUdkP1Qj
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Bitcoin (BC)

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