Dana M. Diederich

Overview

• 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. And clearly documenting what bandaids were put into place.
• 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. And ship that software so my co-workers can get their jobs done.

Skill Areas

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.

Activities & Interests

• Free software development  Among other efforts, I wrote a nice Perl module called Tie::DNS (http://http://search.cpan.org/~diederich/Tie-DNS-0.61/lib/Tie/DNS.pm).  This freely available software makes doing any kind of name lookup very simple.
• (Mostly) Local Travel  The bay area is the most interesting place in the world. My family visits local, and occasionally non-local, places of interest nearly every weekend.
• Hobby Farming  We lived on a 20 acre property which we had been slowly turning into a farm.  This included the construction of a barn, installation of fencing and animal maintenance.

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