I work for a Fortune 50 company, where I am a Principal Technology Engineer. My focuses at work include improving engineer experience and enabling innovative new technology approaches. I’m active in recruiting activities. My daily job puts me in a position where I am able to help others make their apps better, which is something I love.

Skills

I tend to dabble in a little of everything from infrastructure to data to application development. My interests primarily center around the application development world. I’m enthusiastic about using open source software to build solutions quickly and with quality.

I consider my primary skills to be:

  • Development
    • JavaScript/TypeScript
    • Java
    • Python
    • Shell scripting
  • Cloud
    • AWS infrastructure
    • Serverless architecture
    • Event driven architecture
  • Linux
    • Server administration
    • Virtualization technologies (Docker / LXC/ KVM)
    • Self hosting

Personal

I’m a Christian, family focused, and fundamentally conservative. My family attends First Redeemer Church, which is an evangelical Christian church that supports both local and global communities. at church, I serve on the greeting team, which I thoroughly enjoy. Those who know me may find that odd, because I’m an introvert, but for some reason I do enjoy greeting quite a lot.

I like to play video games (probably too much). The older I get, the more I enjoy strategy games. My recent favorites include Factorio and XCOM 2. My all-time favorite FPS games are the Counter-Strike series and Overwatch.

I also like to tinker with my home server. I currently run Proxmox which is a Debian-based distribution that has a nice web interface for managing a virtualized environment using KVM and LXC. On the server, I run a variety of services:

  • Plex Media Server
  • Ubiquiti Controller (for my Unifi Access Points)
  • pfSense (with pfBlockerNg)
  • SFTP Backup Server (I use Arq Backup)
  • Bitwarden (self-hosted password manager)
  • Puppet
  • GitLab
  • LibreNMS (monitoring/alerting)
  • Splunk

On AWS, I host my own e-mail server using Mailcow. You can e-mail me at clete@blackwell.email.