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.

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Monero (XMR)

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Bitcoin (BTC)

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