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About me

Hi. This is me: +

My name is Kumar. Some people call me kd, I’m known for being…

that guy who hosts his own website, email, dropbox, vpn, etc. Read more.
a 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

Projects

My Homelab setup

My Ansible repository used for managing my self-hosted services.
Source on GitLab
Using: Ansible

Namecheap CLI

A containerized CLI to list/add/update/remove DNS records from Namecheap.
Source on GitLab
Using: Go

My dotfiles

My settings for common Linux desktop tooling.
Source on GitLab

Helpthehome(less)

Project info page
Project home
Source on GitLab
Using: NodeJs, React-Native, MongoDB, Pug (jade)

Solutions Repo

Project home
Source on GitLab
Using: NodeJs, MongoDB, Handlebars

+
If you’ve found something above useful, consider sending some coins my way!
+

Professional Life

Treat this section as an extension of my resume.

2020 - now

+
+Currently working as a **DevOps** at [Kepler](https://kepler.space) 🛰️. +This is mostly a software (infrastructure) dev gig for a start-up, which is a bit new for me +coming from a more classical "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, 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: +

Implementing a net-boot infrastructure using Packer, PXE, Awx (Ansible Tower) to keep our +RPi fleet images and configurations in-sync and up-to-date.
Built a custom Linux router to support our lab’s unique hardware testing requirements +for on-demand subnet generation/teardown, and develop Ansible roles switches.
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 our 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.

Beyond my work as an Individual Contributor, I’ve also been responsible for instilling “DevOps” +principles within the team on our road to maturity.

2019 - 2020

+
+Worked as a **DevOps Engineer** at [AcuityAds](https://acuityads.com) 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 +the public cloud 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, with high-availability: +

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 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.
  +
- 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.
+

2016 - 2017

+
+I worked at [Achiga](https://achiga.io) (formerly *WebCanada*) as +part of my [PEY](https://web.cs.toronto.edu/undergraduate/pey) (internship) +program from UofT 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 web, and scripting over the +years in between semesters. +

Donate

Monero (XMR)

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Bitcoin (BTC)

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Kumar Damani - Home