About

Overview

Hello! I’m Tim. I mostly work on app platforms and development. I really enjoy working with Go, check out some of my projects 🚀. Or on Github. I currently live in Sydney, but I’m a Kiwi!

Resume

Name: Tim O’Brien
Email: tim@tekao.net

I’m a detailed oriented engineer workng on app platforms and development. A highlight of my work was working for Compose which currently runs customer containerized services on hundreds of AWS servers, these services are built / updated with software I created.

Work Experience

Github: Platform Engineer

October 2021 - Current, 6 months, Sydney Austalia (remote)

Updated migration software to move from current on-premise Github enterprise product to Github cloud provisioned service. This work involved working with engineers from different parts of Github.

Quantics: Deployment app developer

2020 - 2021 , Sydney Australia

Quantics is my NZ based company, during the past year I’ve been developing a software stack in Go. This is for an app to create tasks that run in Docker, configured and monitored using a web interface to create 12 factor apps. These tasks can be triggered by events, such as a Github hook push event to deploy an app.

Compose: Platform Engineer

October 2016 - September 2019, 2 years 11 months, UK (remote)

The company provides primarily database, data store and message queue services in an integrated platform as a service to developers. Currently these services are running as tens of thousands of containers distributed on hundreds of AWS machines for customers. These services are built, tested and updated using software I created. I documented and developed new features with others. I worked in a team of about 8, my day to day was catching up on Slack, contributing/reviewing code on Github, having scheduled meetings on Zoom, prioritising tasks, responding to incidents working as required to resolve them.

Quantics: App developer

March 2014 - August 2016, 2 Years 5 months, Wellington NZ

Developing web app for data analysis of New Zealand wholesale real time Electricity market. This makes 10 years of pricing information available to compare between generation locations. It displays generation weighted averages and variability over time. From there it allows the user drill down to price/locations of interest. Also developing mobile app for mass transit travel assistance using transit data feeds. This simple to use app calculates routes of services at a particular time on a server and present them as a network map of services at a certain stop on the users phone.

Endace: Postgres Database Engineer

2012 October - 2013 October, 1 year, Auckland NZ

Database focused engineer using Postgres DB containing traffic flows for network monitoring appliance. Optimized existing queries, designed partitioning support, fixed accuracy problems, implemented new visualizations, created tools to benchmark concurrent database queries. Created tools in Go using parallel and pipeline concurrency. Used Linux tools to analyze system performance.

NZX: Data modeling/engineering (contract)

2012, Wellington NZ

Contract with NZX Limited (NZ Stock Exchange), Mysql database support. Development of analytical database on Electricity market. Linux server networking, admin.

KEA3: Linux systems administration (contract)

2011, Wellington NZ

Contract with KEA3. Support of internal Linux server. RAID configuration, fileserver and OpenVPN.

Fastbase: DB optimization (contract)

2010, Wellington NZ

Contract with Fastbase for optimizing Mysql queries and developing best practices for using the database. Reduced lock contention and optimized indexes and query structure.

Electricity Commission NZ: Data modeling/engineering (contract)

2009 - 2011, 2 years, Wellington NZ

Contract with Electricity Commission to develop high scale analytical database using partitioning to analyse effects of the load at each grid point on each transmission line. Created applications to analyze the results using PHP, Jquery and R language.

Market Place Company: Online trading market developer

2007 - 2009, 2 years, Wellington NZ

Market Systems developer, Implementing new features for high volume website/database used in wholesale electricity trading.