Jake Bourke's Email Addresses & Phone Numbers

📖 Summary

My goal is to help companies by providing technical expertise to help lower costs, install or enhance enterprise level infrastructure, improve efficiency, and establish useful processes. I am an autodidact with a passion for technology and over 15 years work experience. I offer real world experience hardened by a passion driven point of view. I am looking to offer my drive, experience and creativity to a team that needs it. I pride myself on being able to enter a startup company as a lone IT infrastructure resource and establish an enterprise quality production environment in extremely short order. Depending on the growth of the company, I am comfortable remaining the sole administrator or growing a team to fill the needs of the served departments. As I project leader I can bring my decade of development experience to the table to help a team marry application development to supporting hardware and software. The results are much more flexible and powerful than a purely development approach, providing "optionality" for the future while meeting the current needs. My motto is "Advenam Non Tangere", or "Do not touch". Touching breaks things, plain and simple. Humans are prone to error and in IT that means bugs, logical errors, or system issues. I firmly believe in using as light a touch as possible when required and leveraging as much automation as possible to ensure consistency.Archduke of Infrastructure @ Upon joining Maxwell Health there were two main priorities: First, build out and refine the underlying systems supporting the product and website to provide reliability and performance; Second, ensure all systems and policies meet HIPAA compliance, including growing them as our company grows to meet "best effort" requirements of security. Once scalable and secure enterprise infrastructure was in place, I was able to build and lead a team to meet the ever growing needs of a rapidly growing company. With goals of a high product user count and an ever expanding number of people to support in Development, QA, and Services we work tirelessly to refine our tools and improve our team velocity. From May 2014 to Present (1 year 8 months) Greater Boston AreaSystems Administrator @ Build, manage, and maintain the NuoDB web presences including the primary website, forums, knowledge base, and Developer Center. I spent most of my time at NuoDB improving the stack and enabling my internal customers to manage their own content. This included: * Increasing server security across the board * Adding HA to all layers of the stack (Balancers, Webs, DB, and File Systems) * Moving to a lower cost host and cutting hosting costs by over 70% * Increasing traffic capacity 10x with the ability to scale horizontally in case of traffic spike * Adding live metrics to the health of the stack via GLTail, Statsite, Graphite, Cubism, Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana * Migrating our content off of several legacy systems into one unified CMS (Drupal) * Integrating services with AWS * Adding proper workflows for quality control and change testing * Integrating NuoDB into our stack and replacing MySQL I really enjoy this kind of work. It's down to earth common sense stuff that really helps get a web property on the right path and keeps it running even in the face of underlying host failures. It simplifies the life of the content maintainers, cuts costs, and increases stack stability. It may not be glamorous, but it often the most needed and most overlooked kind of IT work there is. I have paved the way for fresh feature development and product integration which allow me the opportunity for new code and server projects to call my own. I look forward to the next few months of activity. From May 2013 to May 2014 (1 year 1 month) Greater Boston AreaHosting Engineer @ Working as an Engineer for Acquia is the most challenging position to date. My team and I help maintain several networks comprising thousands of servers for our various free, enterprise, and managed hosting solutions. We support a massive community of Drupal developers and users via these services, and face constant challenges between feature requests, tech debt, and Amazon intricacies. Each sprint my team carves off a little of everything and goes to work. I tend to gravitate toward tasks which let me improve and reinforce our performance and safety and do my best to leave the product a little better every time I commit. Whether it is bringing packages up to date, introducing validation code for our customers backups, adding to our API, or taking a few cycles of load off a server I strive to leave improvement in my wake. By sprint end I have participated in planning; coded busily to have several reviewed, tested, and committed stories; reviewed the code and tests of others; and spent a fair amount of time fixing bugs and tests from our nightly Jenkins runs. From July 2011 to May 2013 (1 year 11 months) Developer and System Administrator - New Media @ I joined a fresh New Media team which was tasked with providing websites to political candidates using Drupal and hosted on a cloud based VM. I later became the server administrator for our web clusters. I began with writing a number of Drupal modules in the months after my start which included modules for Facebook API integration. I eventually inherited administration of our Rackspace web cluster. I updated and expanded the cluster to be fully high availability with fail over for proxies, web servers, and databases. This system is able to handle 3,000,000 requests per day with resources to spare. I implemented a Git/Gerrit server for code review and helped setup a Jenkins/Hudson server to run automated unit tests on committed code. I also helped implement processes which improved our code base through review and code standards. Finally, I designed and created a new cluster on Amazon EC2 to hold what will be the combined New Media department websites. This new cluster improved upon the old cluster by being geographically distributed and automatically scalable with zero single points of failure. This new system also saved $40,000 per year over the old managed hosting using bare iron servers. From March 2010 to July 2011 (1 year 5 months) Senior Applications Developer @ Originally programming in .NET for the company CMS, I was pulled onto special projects because of my expansive skill set. I helped build a Debian Linux server to host these specialized PHP applications. When I arrived, there was no source control system in place. The first thing I did was work with my manager to install an SVN server. The specialized PHP applications I designed and wrote were CMSs for large clients. They had specific needs for call scripts which could be lightly customized. Eventually, I was tasked with designing and writing what would be the company wide CMS for handling all of our call scripts. The move from a custom .NET CMS to one in PHP resulted in considerable licensing savings and provided much more flexibility. From February 2008 to May 2010 (2 years 4 months) Photographer/In House Programmer @ I designed, wrote and launched scheduling software in PHP that mimicked the simple Excel spreadsheet that was being used to coordinate daily activity. I wrote accounting software using Ruby on Rails to replace the buggy and outdated VB desktop app that was in use. This provided web accessibility to the remote studios and eliminated the need for messy nightly MSSQL replication. Finally, I helped set up remote access to our studio locations, as well as troubleshoot and maintain desktop systems. From April 2006 to January 2008 (1 year 10 months) Web Site Designer/Developer @ Due to a slumped programmer job market I started my own web design business which revolved around one off projects with small businesses in the area. Car dealerships, boutiques, and specialty shops were my main customers. From January 2004 to April 2006 (2 years 4 months) Jr. Programmer/Technical Support @ Customer support, application development, and intra-application communication development. From February 2001 to December 2003 (2 years 11 months) Jake Bourke is skilled in: Linux System Administration, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Enterprise IT Infrastructure, Agile Methodologies, Team Leadership, Communication, System Architecture, Enterprise Systems Implementation, Enterprise Systems Development, Large Scale Deployments, Teamwork, PHP, MySQL, Nginx, Salt