I’ve received word that I’m being laid off at the end of September. It was a good run, almost eight years, but after Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent and then systematically moved as much work as possible from the US to Europe and China, the US locations have experienced massive layoffs. It’s finally my turn.

You, dear reader, and I might be able to help each other. If you’re looking for a software configuration management or DevOps type of person for your medium to large Unix/Linux-based development effort, you’ve come to the right place. My job is to take what your developers write, ensure that all the right parts are in all the right places, build exactly what is expected to be built as soon and as quickly as possible, and get it sent off for testing. Ideally, the process to do all that should be as automated as possible, and should not place unnecessary bureaucratic roadblocks in front of people who are just trying to meet their deadlines.

The set of resources that make all this possible includes hardware, and having been a system administrator for a number of years, I can specify and build out the hardware you’ll need, too.

Of course, any build system needs to run in as little wall-clock time as possible, and that cannot always be done by throwing more hardware at it. I have tuned the build scripts, the existing hardware, and the operating systems for maximum performance.

My resume will tell you the specifics of what I’ve been doing over the last 30+ years. You can find it here: http://www.horch.org/resume.docx

I know there’s a lot of interesting work out there that isn’t SCM. I’ve been a developer, a tester, a sysadmin, a project manager, a lab architect, and enough other things that if you’ve got non-SCM work that my skill set still fits, let’s talk.

I don’t clutter my resume with an enumerated set of skills and technologies, so I’ve appended a list to this post. As with any such set, I’m stronger with some than with others, everything from a bit of experience as an end user, e.g., VMware or OpenStack, to products I know well enough to rewrite from scratch, e.g., ClearCase. I have at least passing familiarity with a lot more than what’s listed here, but I’m only showing what I’ve used on the job. If you’re thinking, “This guy looks good, but he’s got no Python/AWS/Rails/MacOS/whatever,” don’t worry; I’m a quick study.

Now the bad news: I live in central New Jersey. That is not going to change. I simply cannot relocate, for a large number of reasons. I would also like to keep any commute to 45 minutes or less, unless I  can work from home at least part of the time. Life’s too short to spend sitting in traffic.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks in advance for contacting me with any leads you might have.

Keywords: C, C++, Korn shell, bash, Perl, Java, ant, HTML, Unix, Linux, HP-UX, BSD, Solaris, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, GNU make, Hudson, Jenkins, SAN, NAS, NetApp, RAID, ClearCase, SCCS, CVS, Git, Gerrit, Jira, Docker, ClearQuest, VMWare, OpenStack, VNC, GNU compiler toolchain, Wind River, Apache, Configuration management, Release engineering, Sanity testing, Continuous integration, Windows, Windows Server, RDP, Active Directory, NFS, NIS, DNS