Brian Kelly's Resume

Brian Kelly
7677 Gray Way
Arvada, CO 80003
303-429-9729 (Home) / 303-736-4414 (Fax)
bkelly@dimensional.com

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Objective

My ten years in the Information Technology profession have taught me how to use my problem solving skills to troubleshoot broken systems, program new products and tools, and architect and implement complete IT solutions. I am flexible, efficient and a quick-learner, so I can work well on my own, but my dependability and communication skills make me a valuable group member. I'm not afraid of hard work, long hours and interesting compensation packages.

Technical Skills

Systems:	Unix/Linux (Solaris, RedHat, HP-UX, AIX and SuSE), Windows (NT 4.0, 2000 and XP) and Mac OS (9 and X)

Networking:	Cisco (routers and switches), Nortel (routers), EMC (SAN, NAS) and Network Appliance (NAS) on Wired, Fibre and Wireless networks

Programming:	Compiled (C/C++ and Java), Scripts (Perl, Korn and Tcl/Tk/Expect), SQL Databases (Oracle and MySQL) and Web (HTML, PHP and Javascript)

Other systems and services: nfs/cifs/samba, firewalls, ftp, http, ssh, dhcp, smtp/pop, nntp, dns and nis

Experience

Atempo, Inc. - Boulder, CO	February 2001 to November 2003
Senior Field Service Engineer

I was the last American employee for this French software company after several rounds of layoffs. I worked with end customers to set up our software, train users and solve stubborn problems and also participated in direct and channel sales models to present our product to prospects. Once I became the only US employee, my responsibilities broadened to include more support and marketing.

Our customers received technical support from me 24/7 on Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Linux. Call backlog dropped 66% after I was dedicated to this position. To help our users fix common problems, I created an online knowledge PHP database and an Internet community. I also programmed tools in C, Perl and Korn that add functionality and find, document and fix bugs.
I was a member of a small sales team that generated up to double the revenue of other teams. In addition to being a technical resource, I developed and presented slide shows and product demonstrations. I created white papers, brochures and marketing strategies but also customer specific solutions such as backup architectures, hardware recommendations, disaster procedures and installation scripts.
I was responsible for collecting and maintaining critical company information such as departmental procedures, sales forecasts and a customer database. In addition, I was frequently asked to develop strategy proposals, implementation plans and resource documents including a newsletter about our competitors and a report describing customer satisfaction.

Messervy Entertainment - Arvada, CO	July 1998 to the Present
Self-Started Company

This is a small, not-for-profit company I created to provide quality web sites for online gamers. It also allows me to dabble in technologies that interest me. This venture has taught me a great deal about programming, software development, code quality and cryptography but more importantly I now better understand the prioritization that is required to run a business and bring a product to market.

I designed, programmed and run a multi-player Internet fantasy adventure game played by thousands each year. Players download a Java applet that creates a TCP/IP connection to a central server written in C. Over the course of this project, I have learned valuable lessons about the development cycle, site security and the importance of error checking. The game can be played at http://www.phantasia4.com.
I maintain a high-bandwidth, 24/7 Internet server for Messervy Entertainment projects. Since I frequently receive hack threats, I use many tools and Perl scripts to monitor the system and alert me to problems. The system and its applications have never been compromised.
Currently, I am building a play-by-email judge for Civilization 3 Play the World game. The web site is written completely in PHP and stores all data in a MySQL database. An unfinished version can be seen at http://66.139.76.164/civ3/judge.php.

MCI WorldCom - Denver, CO	May 2000 to December 2000
Senior Unix System Administrator

For this extended six-month contract position, I installed software, upgraded hardware, optimized performance and enhanced security of production, development and test servers running Solaris, AIX and Tru64 Unix. To minimize the downtime of the department systems, I frequently carried a pager and would respond within 5 minutes to any problems with the systems, applications or network.

The production systems I administrated never had unscheduled downtime or data loss despite 20 disk crashes and 4 CPU failures.
I put together recommendations to replace terabyte disk arrays currently in use on production systems. These proposals, which were later implemented, included estimations for growth, access times and data transfer rates under different raid schemes and implementation methods.
Composed and implemented a proposal on purchasing and setting-up a set of systems needed for testing and development. Factors that were considered included cost, processing power, disk speed, disaster recovery needs, uptime targets and software requirements.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory - Golden, CO	September 1999 to May 2000
Unix System Administrator

This was a six-month contract position to help NREL get on top of a backlog of installation, maintenance and repair jobs on their Solaris, AIX and SGI Unix systems. I was responsible for infrastructure machines such as the firewall and web, mail, ftp, backup, SNMP, NIS, DNS, majordomo and news servers as well as user systems running compilers and commercial software.

I diagnosed and solved many problems that had plagued NREL systems. Examples include an NFS problem between AIX and SGI systems, constantly crashing AIX systems and bugs in Network Health and SNMP clients.
I created many ksh, perl and expect scripts to automate administrator duties such as creating summaries for firewall and SNMP logs and managing IP addresses.
Put together proposals for possible future IT projects in the areas of system security and remote access, capacity planning, host table management, backup procedures and system inventory.

Rocky Mountain Health Care - Denver, CO	December 1998 to August 1999
Unix System Administrator

I installed, maintained, troubleshot and handled backups for 24/7 servers running AIX, HP and Solaris Unix that were both local and remote. I was also responsible for the firewall and the mail, DNS and ftp servers. These were critical systems for the company, so I was required to carry a pager and keep a very flexible schedule.

I created many scripts to make the administration of systems easier. One script checked the status of all systems every fifteen minutes and notified me of any problems it could not resolve.
I replaced the previous backup system with ADSM and handled all aspects of the project from building the data networks to training the operators.

IBM - Boulder, CO	December 1997 to the December 1998
Unix System Administrator

Worked with a team to administrate Unix machines belonging to programmers and testers. One of my primary jobs was immediate up-front "fire fighting" support for users, which required good logic skills, a solid understanding of the available tools and knowledge of the resources on the Internet.

I was assigned and completed many projects. For example, I created a common platform configuration and a procedure that allowed others systems to be quickly cloned from this original.
I re-wrote the existing system backup script to a version that was more reliable, efficient and secure.

Education

Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO
St. Francis High School, Mountain View, CA