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Christopher Grau |
As a programmer, I have built my career on creating tools to bring joy to tasks that people once found difficult or dull, freeing them to in turn improve their own work.
I look at every task and consider how it can be improved. What can—and, more importantly, should—be automated? Would looking at things from a different angle open opportunities for simplification? I may find myself streamlining deployment of an application to a cloud service by creating a full CI/CD stack, or developing small tools to perform repetitive tasks. Instead of manually setting the thermostat, a bit of home automation can easily sync the temperature to match the current solar power generation.
I am constantly seeking opportunities to improve. Nothing pleases me more than seeing the sense of satisfaction, and sometimes joy, that my work creates in others.
DevOps Engineer, Tealium
February 2022–Present
January 2020—January 2022
My official title with NTT DATA is Digital Engineering Lead Advisor, but my role can be thought of as DevOps Engineer and Jack of all Trades. I started my employment with Flux7, prior to its acquisition by NTT DATA, with the goal of acquiring experience with cloud computing. At first, this was with AWS services, but has extended to include Microsoft Azure.
While working with NTT DATA, I have had the opportunity to work on a number of projects for companies in industries ranging from freight logistics to electronic design automation to health care. Highlights include,
- Deployment of CI/CD pipelines, Lambda functions, and AWS Step Functions using the AWS CDK (Python).
- Development of Terraform modules and templates, and Azure Pipelines, to create a greenfield infrastructure in Azure.
- Deployment of IBM Spectrum LSF in AWS using Multicluster and Resource Connector to facilitate workload needs beyond on-premises peak capacity.
- Deployment of enterprise automation software to AWS using custom CloudFormation templates managed by Azure Pipelines.
- Development of a VPC Factory in AWS Service Catalog, using Serverless Transit Network Orchestrator (STNO), NetBox, and a CloudFormation Custom Resource.
In addition to the aforementioned projects, I have occasionally been a member of the internal Platforms team. I served both as an individual contributor and a customer for the Scrum team.
As an individual contributor, I worked on the team's primary product, a custom Landing Zone for organizations using AWS, in addition to several internal tools used by the team.
- Contributed to the design and development of the Landing Zone, based on AWS Control Tower and custom CloudFormation templates deployed using Customizations for AWS Control Tower.
- Implemented an account-agnostic deployment of Cloud Custodian using AWS CodePipeline, with pluggable rule sets.
As a customer I guided the team through a series of sprints to implement, for the first time, code quality metrics and test coverage of the primary product.
February 2006—January 2020
I started with Qualcomm as a Senior IT Engineer, eventually working my way up to Senior Staff Programmer Analyst. With each promotion, my responsibilities vis-a-vis the batch compute infrastructure grew in scope.
As a Senior IT Engineer with the Engineering Compute organization, I played a pivotal role in maintaining and enhancing the LSF cluster used by the Hardware Engineering teams.
- Developed a Perl library on top of the LSF::Base and LSF::Batch modules, to provide an Abstraction Layer for CAD teams to build workflows.
- Maintained internal forks of the LSF::Base and LSF::Batch modules to support new releases of LSF software.
- Developed tools for users and administrators to interact with LSF, allowing them to focus on accomplishing their work instead of worrying about the intricacies of the batch system.
As a Staff IT Engineer with the Engineering Compute organization, my role and responsibilities grew in support of the LSF clusters we maintained.
- Designed new installation and maintenance procedures to allow a small team to support dozens of LSF clusters around the world.
- Developed custom LSF run-time components (e.g., job starter, modular esub, modular elim).
- Created unique job scheduling solutions to support FPGA-based hardware accelerators.
- Designed a distributed caching service for license usage data, alleviating significant load on legacy FLEXlm license servers.
The shift in title from IT Engineer to Programmer Analyst was done to better align my title with the kind of work I did. Unlike a traditional IT Engineer, I spent the majority of my time writing code to solve problems, rather than maintaining systems.
- Developed a system to send internal batch computing workloads from LSF to
Amazon EC2 for processing.
- This was done as a custom solution prior to the release of LSF Resource Connector.
- Developed configuration- and data-driven FLEXlm license management tools, saving countless administrator hours and significant licensing costs.
- Implemented new Perl installation and support standards for the global AFS-based software environment, extending to general Open Source software support guidelines.
- Worked with administrators to create Splunk field extractions, macros, Python-based external lookups, and custom data feeds to improve system monitoring and incident analysis.
- Developed custom daemons to monitor compute system state, repair it when possible, or remove it from the cluster and alert administrators to the problem.
With my promotion to Senior Staff Programmer Analyst, my focus shifted from creating tools to assist others in their work to designing systems to enhance the compute capabilities of the LSF clusters.
- Developed machine learning models to predict the resources needed by a batch job, such as memory and CPU utilization.
- Integrated third party predictive models with the LSF batch job submission process as a holistic grid optimization solution.
- Led teams of software developers and systems analysts to fulfill the strategic objectives of the organization.
University of California, San Diego
1995—1999
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Minor, Psychology
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
August 2020—December 2023
AWS Certified Developer – Associate
December 2020—December 2023
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
October 2020—October 2023
Mostly used as a way to keep all of my configuration safe and in one place, I use this as a showcase of the tools I use to be productive.
I have used Vim for many years and have collected my configuration here, which I use to help others learn about Vim's features.
A trend among technologists is to self-host services that do not rely on any one company or cloud provider. I have started with Grafana and a few data collectors. Eventually, I will replace most of the cloud services I use with self-hosted applications.