Randi Harper

location: Seattle, WA
phone: (408) 840-3273
email: randi@freebsd.org

Employment

FreeBSD src committer (6/2010 - current)

· Maintained FreeBSD’s sysinstall (now replaced). Added USB thumb drive support.

· Made improvements to the automation utility of the installer.

· Basic bugfixes and documentation edits to align with software changes.

Co-host, FLOSS Weekly (9/2011 - current)

· Interviewed numerous open source projects for FLOSS Weekly

· Largest Open Source podcast

· Published on TWiT.tv (This Week in Tech), Leo Laporte’s podcast network.

AWS Technical Evangelist, Amazon Web Services (12/2011 - 12/2012)

· With a primary focus on content, created a number of tutorial and solutions based video sets for public distribution. Handled the process from start to finish: creating the scripts while working with project managers, recording the screencast, and doing the voiceover and final editing.

· Began the overhaul of AWS’ articles/tutorials and later became the manager for all article content.

· Wrote several tools to aid in the creation of metrics reports for all technical content.

· Wrote scripts to aid in populating the AWS TCO calculator with pricing data.

· Assisted in the planning and booth management of AWS events.

· Used twitter, G+, and facebook as evangelism tools.

· Led the effort to better improve the relationship between AWS and several open source projects.

· Spoke at several open source conferences on behalf of AWS.

TSEII, Isilon (11/2010 – 11/2011)

· Worked on the enterprise support team for Isilon storage products

· Wrote and edited many KB articles as well as a UNIX training guide.

· Ran a single UNIX training class shortly before leaving to pass on knowledge to new hires.

· Created technical documentation/coursework.

· Fixed a few bugs and passed the code diffs on to the dev team.

QA Engineer, Northscale (6/2010 – 11/2010)

· Implemented a test plan for membase.

· Designed many automation scripts for QA using perl, python, and shell.

Developer, Data Robotics (2/2010 – 5 /2010)

· Rewrote the service initialization and DroboApps system in busybox ash shell scripts.

· Ported numerous open source software projects to Linux ARM for distribution on the Drobo Apps site.

Senior UNIX Systems Administrator, Cisco/IronPort (3/2008 – 10/2009)

· Performed everyday systems administrator duties on FreeBSD servers.

· Handled and solved more advanced FreeBSD issues outside the typical system administrators realm.

· Took over duties as the FreeBSD build manager.

· Wrote many perl and shell based tools to automate daily tasks.

· Worked extensively with debugging problematic IPMI hosts.

Service Engineer, Yahoo! (10/2006 – 10/2007)

· Acted as the service engineer and build master for Network Personalization.

· Maintained over 150 FreeBSD and Linux servers across 16 datacenters world-wide.

· Worked with the developers discussing general infrastructure planning.

· Helped developers track down and solve various bugs.

· Wrote documentation for development procedures, build/release checklists, and service engineering guides.

· Wrote many perl based tools used in production.

· Managed and re-wrote a complex nagios configuration and did 24/7 pager response.

· Fine-tuned FreeBSD systems for performance.

· Planned and implemented a large-scale FreeBSD 4.11 to 6.1 migration.

· Handled capacity planning, load balancing/high –availability, and all other hardware considerations.

Software Developer, StayOnline (7/2005 – 2/2006)

· Originally joined the company as a Systems Administrator Contractor, but was quickly moved to the development group.

· Aided in the redesign and development of part of the primary product line.

· Developed most software in perl, emphasizing on SNMP interaction with network devices by such vendors as Paradyne, Merlot, and Cisco.

· Replaced CVS with subversion for the primary code repo server.

· Installed and managed trac for the development team.

· Wrote programs to aid the support department in tracking device problems.

UNIX Systems Administrator, Interland (11/2000 – 2/2005)

· Participated in the data migration from acquired hosting companies to new datacenter locations, as well as documenting the administrative programs in place in those datacenters.

· Worked in the ATL datacenter maintaining 10k+ UNIX based servers as well as implementing new UNIX solutions.

· Variants of UNIX used include Solaris, Linux, BSDOS, FreeBSD, IRIX, and OpenBSD on a variety of platforms.

Affiliations

Src committer, The FreeBSD Project

Currently acting as a src committer and maintainer of sysinstall, FreeBSD’s installer. As a part of the marketing team, I also work at the FreeBSD booth at trade shows and conferences when available.

Conferences and Media

Co-host, FLOSS Weekly

Occasional co-host for the Open Source podcast FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz.

Speaker, OSCON 2012

Presented with Mitch Garnaat about Open Source at Amazon Web Services

Speaker, BSDCan 2012

Presented on Introduction to Amazon Web Services

Speaker, Flourishconf 2010

Spoke about women in open source.

Guest Speaker, FLOSS Weekly, January 2010

Spoke on improvements in FreeBSD 8, the future of FreeBSD’s installer, FreeBSD’s place in the corporate world, and various community issues.

Speaker, BSDCan 2009

Presented on setting up and automating FreeBSD installations.