Currently hiking the Appalachian Trail, I'm a long term Linux & programming professional & hobbyist with a strong background in DevOps and good experience in the (LAMP) web development world as well. Primary programming language has been Perl, but digging into Python recently. Also like playing with other OSes, and have a decent professional background with Solaris. I also enjoy working with antique systems like the Commodore 64 and Amiga and pushing their limits. I will not be seeking new opportunities until finishing the Trail, estimated around the 2nd week of November 2015.

Hiker @ Currently hiking the Appalachian Trail and will not be seeking new job opportunities until mid-November. In the meantime, enjoy some Trail photos at the link below. From May 2015 to Present (8 months) Existence @ Not all careers are official jobs! Hobbies and work can often overlap and complement each other - even when in totally unrelated fields. * Ethnobotany with a focus on plant medicines and the indigenous pharmacopoeias of South America, as well as trying to breed the most viciously delicious chiles I can. * Trying to merge the GRUB2 variants from Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD/PC-BSD, AROS, Syllable etc and looking at rEFInd as a possible unification layer. * The study of languages, both through historical linguistics and (drawing on my background in psychology) the fascinating field of psycholinguistics. * Dipping my toes into chaos math by way of Heinz Pagels after some recent revisiting of Buddhism and gnostic proto-Christianities through his wife Elaine Pagels' books. * A lot of weird corners of the hard and soft sciences, most of which would likely bore you. From August 1972 to Present (43 years 5 months) Linux/Networking DevOps Engineer @ * CentOS/RHEL OS customization to support a new virtualization platform under development... lots of work with QEMU/KVM, SELinux, QPID, and affiliated bits and pieces. * Migration of platform from CentOS 6.5 to 7l0 and rebuilding/testing/integrating required RPMs using inhouse source, SRPMs from Fedora (both back & forward porting of FC 19, 21, and Rawhide packages), RHEL 7.1 Beta, and third party repos like EPEL, ELRepo and NUX. * Configuration management and deployment using Ansible (similar to Chef/Puppet minus a lot of the overhead) and custom tools. * Research and testing of related opensource products such as SmartOS (with DogeOS GUI layer), Proxmox, the Docker integtation in Fedora 21 Cockpit, etc. * Nagios system/network monitoring evaluation project * Administration of a growing network infrastructure - DNS, DHCP, firewalls, etc - both on a hardware and software level. * Support for the Atlassian toolset including Confluence, JIRA, Stash, Crucible and Bamboo; migration of cloud hosted JIRA/Confluence and Github hosted code to local instances of JIRA/Confluence/Stash. * Support for Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and Active Directory servers From August 2014 to December 2014 (5 months) Washington D.C. Metro AreaLinux Systems Engineer/DevOps Geek (on contract from Veredus, Inc) @ Linux DevOps engineer for a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting child care services awareness. Maintenance and redesign of Linux and MySQL infrastructure, supporting Java development team on www.naccrraware.net (mostly Tomcat/MySQL based) and Drupal & WordPress based public websites (www.naccrra.org, www.childcareaware.org and others). Also supported and/or set up internal tools including Confluence/Jira, Nagios, Gemini, MRTG, Munin, and in-house tools. Redesigned Nagios monitoring system, adding custom written monitors and extensions such as Perona MySQL monitoring, NRPE, NSCA, NagiosQL,etc. Researched systems management/configuration tools including Cobblerd, SpaceWalk, Puppet and explored methods of unifying configuration, monitoring and systems/process inventory databases. Also general datacenter maintenance tasks such as UPS battery replcement, re-cabling server racks, etc. From September 2013 to March 2014 (7 months) Applications Developer / WebDev @ PHP & Perl development, MySQL DBA, and Joomla & WordPress kludgemonkey in support of rcn.com, rcntv.com and rcnbusiness.com websites. HTML/CSS fixer-upper for external contractor provided content which usually arrived in a form unimportable to Joomla. Provided tech support for marketing department. From June 2012 to March 2013 (10 months) Senior Geek of Perl, part time Linux/Solaris sysadmim, and backup DBA @ Responsible for LAMP/Perl based applications including QuickFacts, Economic Indicators Briefing Room, TIGER/Line Shapefiles GIS data download system, NAICS Industry Search, and other internal and external tools. Performed code reviews of scripts being submitted for public website. Ran Jira project management system. Took part in trial use of Amazon cloud services as possible hosting alternative, assisting in the design of a CentOS install image to meet Census security standards and adapting the TIGER/Line tools to run on AWS. Wrote lots of documentation, both of existing systems and as design docs for new projects. Various sysadmin and backup DBA duties. Major systems I worked on can be seen at http://quickfacts.census.gov, http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/briefroom/BriefRm, and http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html From December 2008 to June 2012 (3 years 7 months) Senior Perl Contractor Person to Census (see above) @ Contractor position at the US Census Bureau, see description under Census section. From November 2008 to June 2012 (3 years 8 months) Senior LAMP Developer @ One man IT shop... Perl & PHP developer for internal tools and public dels.nas.edu website. Linux sysadmin. MySQL & Postgres DBA. Redesigned public website's HTML/CSS and developed Perl CGIs to Make It Go(tm). The site has since been replaced, but a partial archive is visible at http://bit.ly/1gF8G4G From December 2007 to November 2008 (1 year) Systems Programmer for NetOps and SysOps teams @ Perl geek who worked on too many projects to list here, see my resume for a list of a few of the bigger ones. MySQL DBA. Linux/Unix sysadmin. CVS repository admin. Jira, Confluence and Request Tracker admin. Also the life of the party at our monthly Beer Bash events, if only because I usually brought in a few bottles of my homebrewed chocolate beer. While AOL's products may be mocked a lot (except for that brief & disturbing period around that movie "You've Got Mail") as a job, it was just about as awesome as Erol's. People were all just as intelligent, multi-skilled, and eccentric. Over the years, they'd built an internal network that must've been achieving self-consciousness. The in-house monitoring & systems management tool suite their Perl geeks built years ago were at least as good if not better than super-modern tools like Puppet. In fact, much of my philosophy on systems engineering today was picked up from working at AOL (though since Erol's had a similar philosophy if not yet as fancy of an implementation, I guess I'd already been baptized in the ways of Sys-Fu). From November 2003 to October 2007 (4 years) Cashier / Shift Supervisor @ I originally got this as a part time job nights/weekends while working at RCN. While buying some tomato plants, on a whim thought... "Hey, my job is cool, but I sit at a desk talking to a computer and virtually never walking around or meeting new people. This place sounds like the exact opposite." And it was... BALANCE ACHIEVED! From 2002 to 2005 (3 years) Systems Developer @ Perl geek responsible for domain name & IP block registration system (internal LAMP application), cablemodem provisioning system, and other scripts large and small. Admin for Radius servers, Inktomi webcache servers, and firewall bastion hosts. Performed Y2K audit for development department. From November 1997 to July 2003 (5 years 9 months) Systems Programmer, Business Services Group @ Sole Linux sysministrator/architect for Business Services Group. Served as information resource for Business Services tech support & engineering staff. Interface to NOC & core systems engineers. Set up Reba McEntire's reba.com web & RealAudio server. While switching from the sysadmin group to BSG was because of a manager who enticed me with a not so accurate descripcion de el yob, and something I quickly regretted... I did eventually manage to... well, let's just say BSG ceased to exist as an entity and I got to move to The Frogpit (what the lair of the Perl geeks was called, long story involving a rubber frog hand puppet), where I was a very happy tadpole for a long time. From June 1996 to November 1997 (1 year 6 months) Systems Administrator/NOC Supervisor @ Started out as a junior sysadmin working 11PM-7AM but soon proved myself worthy to see daylight and was promoted to NOC supervisor. That role included herding cats (ie., managing junior sysadmins), fixing what my minions couldn't, and generally coordinating with my underlings, counterparts at network peer companies, and the Erol's overlords to keep the internet working. Built most of our systems/network monitoring system, named Iron Fist after a random comment from my boss. That same boss also set me on the righteous path of Perl, which is what really got my career going. Worked with a lot of utterly insane people with no brain-to-mouth filters (hey, no wonder I loved it there) but who were all really cool and incredibly smart and took an amateur computer geek playing with Linux at home and turned him into a multi-skilled systems engineer and software developer with some networking skills on the side. While at first it was total chaos there with no clear job divisions or processes, that kind of was good since I was forced to learn lots of things I wouldn't have even thought to touch. I also learned most of my weird vocabulary like "automagic" and adding "-fu" to anything to indicate clue (OK I guess "clue" was mostly standard office jargon for "skills" so add that to the list). And of course LART (either a noun or a verb... many people had baseball bats, hammers, or battle sporks known collectively as Loser Attitude Readjustment Tools. Many a time I was tempted to grab a LART myself and LART the crap out of someone... and probably just as often had to run from LART wielding geeks because I'd just done something rocket-surgeon worthy like the infamous "pico master.passwd"). Also learned how to brew beer & mead from several folks there, though unfortunately that hobby doesn't seem likely to pay the bills. From June 1996 to June 1997 (1 year 1 month) Technician @ I fixed videogames, rides, and the animatronic robots at Chuck E. Cheese... but of more relevance, I installed Linux on a beat up old 386 PC that was sitting unused in the tech room and wrote a primitive ticketing system, spare parts inventory, and part-supply company database to keep track of games that were broken and how to get the things to fix them. Though often times, duct-tape was the primary repair tool. From March 1994 to July 1996 (2 years 5 months)

Dotcom Dropout @ Northern Virginia Community College From 1991 to 2001 HS Diploma @ W. T. Woodson High School From 1986 to 1990 Craig Schenk is skilled in: Perl, Apache, Linux, Unix, MySQL, Shell Scripting, LAMP, Software Development, Nagios, JIRA, System Automation, System Monitoring, VirtualBox, Red Hat Linux, CGI