Dana M. Diederich

Overview

• Engineering, creating and shaping High Availability is my forte. Through many and diverse focus areas, LiveOps achieved 99.99% availability in Q4 2011. The VP of Operations at the time, Gary Slater, stated that my work was the single largest factor behind that achievement.
• I am passionate about making things work better and more efficiently. Fundamentally, I am a programmer, with a deep and wide streak of operational experience, ranging from all kinds of Linux system administration to databases to strong networking skills.
• There's no emergency or fire that I'm hesitant to deal with. I'm very comfortable doing what it takes, in the immediate short term, working with a team, to get things working again. Along with that, all of the hacks and bandaids will be clearly documented and highlighted, and put high on the fix list.
• Most of all, I like to understand, assimilate and process all of the issues, big and small, that need to be made smooth, and write elegant integration software. Shipping that automation so my co-workers can get their job done is job one for me.

Achievements

• 99.99% availability Q4 2011 There were many facets to this achievement.
  • Exceptional monitoring coverage of the entire production platform.
  • Innovative release management and automation.
  • Structural reduction of single points of failures in various critical paths.
  • Long-term and deep architectural work with various Engineering areas
  • Day to day focus on nearly every operational fascit of our platform.
• World-class Monitoring John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, was so impressed with what he saw that he sent a team of senior engineers, under NDA, to examine the monitoring system we built at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., to consider licensing it.
• The 'Go To' guy for real-time incident management If something is on fire, I am the person who is asked to manage it.
• Team Building Making sure the people I work with have what they need is critical. This important work isn't done as their manager, but as their co-worker and friend.
• Efficiency Always I have a hard rule: servers need to spend resources on the application, not operational tools and agents. My software and software I am responsible for almost never shows up in 'top' on production servers. Over three years, while the platform volume has gone up three-fold, resources used by monitoring and release has stayed flat.

Character

• Innovative  At LiveOps, the existing graphing infrastructure was old and fallen into decay, making it very difficult to add any new metrics. Over a week, I found, analyzed, piloted, tested and started graphing a dozen highly useful operational metrics using Graphite. Six months later, efficiently using existing hardware resources, we were doing minutely graphs of tens of thousands of metrics.
• Driven  I will work through any obstacles or challenges that come up during the pursuit of an objective. At Wal-Mart, we needed to deploy our management systems into all of the remote sites.  Due to some arcane and undocumented systems restrictions, the first two rollout attempts were not successful. We tried another method to write the software and it rolled out completely and without incident.  It served our monitoring and management needs flawlessly since.
• Customer Focused  One of the key benefits I bring to any organization is customer focus.  I consider any person or organization I come in contact and can assist a potential customer. At LiveOps, our senior release engineer was becoming overwhelmed with many different kinds of weekly software releases, so I permanently took over a portion of them. I also served as backup for the primary Linux sysadmins, DBAs and Network Engineers when people were either busy or out of the office.
• Humility  All too often, senior operations people don't feel it necessary to sit down and work with many people in their area and company, including the fresh college hires. I believe, to my core, that that automation is best made after sending time working with the stake-holders. Whatever tools Ego builds will not be long useful or long lasting.

Skill Areas

Work History

LiveOps Inc	Senior Operations Tools Developer	2009-present
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc	Advanced Network Engineer	1998-2009
NorthWest Arkansas Community College	Instructor, Linux System Administration	2003
NorthWest Arkansas Community College	Instructor, Perl Programming	2002
Expert Business Systems	Consultant to Wal-Mart	1997-1998
US Air Force	Senior Airman, Computer Programmer	1993-1997

Education, newest to oldest

• Attended a week of Puppet training
• System Management Arts In Charge (SMARTS), all sections
• Java training
• HP OpenView training, both sections
• Advanced Cisco Configuration
• HP IT Operations, both sections
• Javascript training
• Franklin Covey, various sections
• Military technical training, computer programming, at Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi
• Military basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas
• Most of a Computer Science BS from The California State Polytechnic University in Pomona California
• Minor in music composition and conducting from the same
• Completed secondary education at Leffingwell High School, Norwalk, California

References Available Upon Request