Hi, I'm Andrew Breksa
I have over nine years of experience building and improving software, notably clinical research enrollment applications, accounting systems, and cybercrime data aggregation systems.
My responsibilities have included systems design, software development/engineering, database/data schema design, automated testing, "DevOps", and system administration. I have worn and continue to wear many hats, and take a pragmatic approach to software and system development.
I've built hyper-media APIs, accounting systems, data collection services, internal tools such as distributed job execution frameworks and data ingestion pipelines, as well as fully-automated integration testing suites. I've also maintained and improved user-facing web applications, as well as written documentation, integrations, and client tools as needed.
I've lead teams of distributed and co-located engineers while working as the point of contact for key stakeholders. I continually work to secure cross-functional contractual agreements and communication to ensure rapid product development and minimize time-to-market.
I have Experience With
PHP 5+
Development
I've developed full-stack database-driven web applications, as well as internal tools such as cross-system data synchronization utilities, components of a "lambda" data ingestion pipeline, and job execution frameworks.
Python 3
Development
I use Python 3 for utility and HTTP microservice development. Specifically, I've used Python as a toolkit for novel data collection services taking advantage of the extensive open source libraries in the Python ecosystem.
Java SE 7/8 & EE 6
Development
I have experience writing command line Java 7/8 applications such as data scraping tools, testing suites, and multi-threaded utilities. I've also maintained, improved, and enhanced legacy Java EE 6 web applications.
Terraform
System Administration
I've designed and implemented Infrastructure-as-Code powered by Terraform, Ansible, and GitLab on DigitalOcean, managing Droplets, Firewalls, and DNS records.
Ansible
System Administration
I've designed and implemented Infrastructure-as-Code powered by Terraform, Ansible, and GitLab, provisioning Ubuntu hosts with inventory driven by Terraform state.
ELK 5+
System Administration/Development
I've setup and integrated distributed ELK clusters for log and metric collection as well as used Elasticsearch as an application-backing search engine and document store.
MySQL/MariaDB
System Administration/Development
I use MySQL extensively from simple CRUD applications to applications handling hundreds of gigabytes of data with extensive business logic and as the source-of-truth for other data stores.
memSQL/Singlestore
System Administration/Development
I've set up, configured, and built applications on top of Singlestore, utilizing both row and column stores for datasets with millions of records, including usage of JSON data.
SphinxSearch
System Administration/Development
I've designed, maintained, and extended SphinxSearch indexes, and have extended existing applications to use the lightning-fast searching provided by SphinxSearch.
Redis
System Administration/Development
I use Redis as an extremely fast caching and key-value layer for common and small-value data, as well as a TTL-centric storage engine for time-specific workloads.
etcd2/etcd3
System Administration/Development
I use etcd as a configuration and key-value store for utilities and scripts, with functionality from data restoration and data parsing to maintaining state across multiple applications.
Selenium
System Administration/Development
I've used Selenium and the WebDriver protocol extensively, from managing fleets of docker-powered selenium hub instances for QA to scraping web content.
Slim 3+
Development
I use Slim 3 for utilities, APIs, and prototype applications; commonly with league/plates and other PHP League packages (such as league/container and league/event).
Zend Framework 1+
Development
I've developed production APIs in Zend Framework 2 that serve millions of requests a month and have updated Zend Framework 1 applications to enhance functionality and security.
Laravel 4+
Development
I've built Laravel application on the latest releases of Laravel as well as added functionality to, refactored, and maintained heavily customized Laravel 4 applications.
OpenAPI/Swagger
Development
I've written RESTful Hyper-Media APIs that serve content in HAL-JSON and other formats and containers, documented and contractualized using specification tools such as OpenAPI/Swagger.
I've Worked With
Amazon Web Services
System Administration/Development
I've managed and built with EC2, ECS, S3, Elasticsearch clusters, AWS Lambda, SQS, and other services on AWS.
DigitalOcean
System Administration
I've managed Droplets, Firewalls, DNS, and Spaces manually as well as via Terraform.
Docker
System Administration/Development
I use Docker/Docker Swarm for seamless local development and production deployment.
Jira/Confluence (Hosted)
Project Managment
I use Jira/Confluence not only as an engineer but as a Product Manager and administrator, working in and driving SDLC development.
Stripe
System Administration/Development
I've designed and built custom, large-scale, payment solutions on top of the Stripe platform, as well as integrated basic Stripe functionality.
Gitlab
System Administration
I've setup, administered, and used self-hosted Gitlab as a controlled and functional alternative to Github as well as a CI/CD platform.
Sentry (Hosted)
System Administration
I've used Sentry as a central point for collecting application-layer issues for triage and tracking, with integrations with Slack and PagerDuty.
Grafana 6+
System Administration
I use Grafana as a visualization and alerting tool with data from memSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, Cloudwatch, and Elasticsearch.
GET IN TOUCH
Feel free to contact me via either of the methods below
Email
andrew [at] andrewbreksa.com
LinkedIn