Kumar Damani

Welcome!

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

• that guy who hosts his own website, email, dropbox, and vpn
• 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 are designed to make people 😥
• a B.Sc in Computer Science at the University of Toronto with a focus in Natural Language Processing

My Projects

• My VPS
  • My Ansible repository used for managing my self-hosted services.
  • Source on GitLab
  • Using: Ansible
• Namecheap CLI
  • A CLI application to list/add/update/remove DNS records from Namecheap.
  • Source on GitLab
  • Using: Go
• My dotfiles
  • My settings for common Linux tooling.
  • Source on GitLab
• Helpthehome(less)
  • Project info page
  • Source on GitLab
  • Using: NodeJs, React-Native, MongoDB, Pug (jade)
• Solutions Repo
  • Project home page
  • Source on GitLab
  • Using: NodeJs, MongoDB, Handlebars

If you've found something above useful, consider sending some Monero my way!

Work Experience

• [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:

  • 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.

  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.

• [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.

Donation

• XMR address:

  42hFshxmNoFZfAkDJTjSx9MUruMHdLTiDTE4efpP7xZTYwHMjwDZ6eJea2EnyBGGr5ab81cAovBxxT6KSvpUY5roUdkP1Qj