[DFW.pm] Who wants my job?

Mike South msouth at gmail.com
Mon Nov 4 12:15:25 PST 2013


Hi,

I've been "laterally 'promoted'", but the guy they had to replace me ended
up taking another position, so we're looking for another replacement.

The technical name of my job is "release engineer" but I've turned it into
"write code to do the releases for me, and then write code to do all the
other stuff there is to do".  It's not 100% coding yet, but management is
happy to see more and more automation, so it's a pretty good gig from that
standpoint.

I have a dancer app running from a perlbrewed perl (so you can install
whatever modules, etc, you want independent of what development is doing).
 It's just getting to the point where the app is paying off for the work I
put into it and begging for all kinds of expansion.  I really don't want to
leave it, to be honest, but there's so much depth of functionality possible
with it that there's no way I can keep working on it and get the new stuff
done, too.

I'll be available indefinitely for questions and stuff so there should be
no problems with mystery code or whatever.

The position is in Operations, and it includes things like
triage/diagnostic/post-event investigation of live performance issues.  All
of which are just further opportunities to write code to make all the
processes easier and more automatic.

One simple example--the application we're supporting runs under mod_perl
and is able to receive a USR2 signal and respond by dumping a stack trace
of diagnostic information.  I wrote something that sends a process that
signal and then tails the apache log watching for the signature of the
output, then reporting it back (or reporting the absence of a response
after a timeout period).  Nothing extremely fancy or anything but it was
fun to write and I hadn't messed around with inter process communication
for a while so I learned stuff doing it.

Also wrote a slick little log parser that pulls performance data from a
custom apache log and dumps it into a Sqlite database which you can then
query to your heart's content--or just mail to development and tell them
it's their problem.

These are in addition to the Dancer app I mentioned earlier (and will
probably be sucked into it, actually) which manages the release process and
is slowly taking over a lot of formerly laborious diagnostic and
maintenance tasks.

It's full time telecommute with occasional travel to the Boston and San
Mateo locations for "Operations Summits" and company-wide all-hands Ops
meetings and stuff like that.

One of the best bosses I've ever worked for, too.

I think they give me an iPad or something if you join via my referral, so
be aware that I have that as a possible conflict of interest :).

We're a linux shop, I think the machines are RHEL (older ones v5 something,
newer v6), mysql databases, the application is in perl and most of the
supporting scripts are also in perl or bash.  The perlbrewed perl we are
using is 5.14.2, but nothing's keeping you from updating to more recent
than that if you want to.

We have just started moving our operations codebase into gitlab (like an
internally hosted github).  In addition to being responsible for the
production releases of the NetSuite OpenAir product, you are responsible
for managing and releasing the code that the ops team writes.

Major releases happen six times a year during Saturday release windows
(5-9am central) which are planned well in advance of the event.

There is a slipstream release of minor fixes every Thursday night at 9, but
almost all of the work for that is pre-done by my Dancer app now, and we're
very close to the point where the last bit could be cronned.

The on-call rotation is kind of in flux right now--when we get it back
running normally I will expect to be on call once every six weeks.
 Incidents requiring off-hours attention are pretty rare, though (we just
celebrated a year without a single site-wide incident).

It would be best for the candidate to know OO Perl as well as being very
familiar with sysadmin-type tasks (I'm stronger on the Perl and weaker on
the sysadmin stuff, but that's fine, and it would work fine in the other
direction, too).

If you're interested, or know someone that would be, let me know.  Also,
since it's telecommute, if you know someone located elsewhere that would be
interested, that would be possible too (I think they have some restrictions
on which states they can hire in based on some considerations regarding tax
or insurance status or whatever--I just don't know which or how strict it
is, and they have bought quite a few companies recently so I think that
restriction is getting smaller by the month).

mike
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