Noel Cower

Statement

I’m a programmer with a focus on designing and implementing stable and highly-available systems that require minimal maintenance. I live in production environments.

Personal

  • GitHub
  • Blog

Work

  • DevOps Engineer
    Apr 2017 — Present
    Kochava
    Sandpoint, ID

    I design, implement, and maintain infrastructure for various products at Kochava. I also write software for monitoring, automation, scaling, system administration, and other operations tasks in the Go and Erlang pro­gram­ming languages. This includes writing job schedulers to manage databases, our internal Debian package server, our Redis-protocol frontend to Kafka, our VM auto-scaler daemon, and other production and exper­imental projects.

    I write Ansible playbooks to provision and update systems. I’ve maintain our Mesos servers; worked with the dev team to deploy new systems on baremetal, Kubernetes, and VMs; and helped tune production applications’ performance. I’m part of the oncall rotation as part of production upkeep.

  • Software Engineer
    Aug 2014 — Apr 2017
    Kochava
    Sandpoint, ID

    While on the development team, I worked on backend systems, including post­back engines, impression ingestion, postback logging, and product APIs for Traffic Import, Media Guide, Collective v1, and other REST APIs. I focused on building stable and perform­ant systems that scaled well under load. I also contributed to SDK and UI development. I’ve worked on deployment processes for most of Kochava’s systems. I migrated all source repositories to Git and maintained our GitLab and GitLab CI servers.

    In April 2017, I moved to the LiveOps team to focus on the deployment, automation, monitoring, performance, and scalability of our current and future production systems.

  • Programmer
    Jul 2010 — Aug 2014
    Self-Employed
    Sandpoint, ID

    I developed software for macOS, Android, and Linux during my education at Boise State University. This includes the Snow game engine; the snow-common C++ library; and the Rusalka VM. I’ve written various OpenGL Ruby gems (mostly in C).

  • Intern
    Oct 2012 — Dec 2012
    Turning Technologies
    Youngstown, OH
  • Contracted Consultant
    Jul 2009 — Aug 2009
    Leadwerks Corporation
    Las Vegas, NV

Skills Overview

  • Programming

    I began programming back in 2004-ish and have worked on software for servers, mobile devices, and desktops. My focus is on building tools and systems that are useful, efficient, and can run for years at a time without concern.

    I’ve built a number of high-performance, mission-critical sys­tems for Kochava, including impression consumers, post­back delivery services, and other services. I’m interested in building networked sys­tems with Go and Erlang on baremetal, VMs, and containers (as with Kubernetes).

  • Writing & Communication

    I received an English degree in the writing em­phasis at Boise State University. I wrote technical documents, news articles, nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. There, I focused on crafting easy-to-read and approachable writing (in add­ition to more bizarre writing). I’ve run various blogs over the years to share short fiction and poetry for classes and personal writing. I’ve done many student presentations as well, both to students and faculty, including a panel on tablet apps used by students to help BSU faculty.

Technical Skills

  • Kubernetes
  • Mesos
  • Docker
  • Go (aka Golang)
  • Erlang
  • C and C++
  • Ruby
  • MySQL
  • Ansible
  • bash, zsh
  • Linux
  • Vim

Education

  • Boise State University
    Aug 2009 — May 2013
    Boise, ID

    Graduated magna cum laude, earning a B.A. in English (writing emphasis).

  • North Idaho College
    Jan 2005 — May 2008
    Coeur d'alene, ID