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Career Summary
Senior Technical Support Engineer and System Administrator familiar with handling difficult cases and customers. Over ten years experience in technical support and system administration of several hardware architectures, operating systems, and network infrastructures. Skilled troubleshooter, capable of black and grey box testing and bug management.
Technical Skills
- 20 years of customer service. Over 12 years of system administration and technical support.
- Intel/AMD, Apple, SGI, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard architecture.
- Unix/Linux/OSX style and Windows operating systems.
- LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration and operation, Perl and shell scripting.
- Network hardware and infrastructure, TCP/IP, routing, and the OSI model.
- Customer support and advocacy, and customer case management.
- Black and grey box testing, test case documentation, bug authoring, and bug management.
History
Attachmate Corp., Seattle, WA
Emulation and mainframe integration software manufacturer.
- Technical Support Engineer, March 18, 2007, to April 16, 2009
- Supported legacy and current Integration software products.
- Built relationships with customers, referring opportunities back to the Sales organization.
- Documented software bugs based on field issues, and advocated for fixes on behalf of customers and field engineers. Development used these bugs to improve product quality, resulting in a better product for the customers.
- Acted as the Product Advisor for the mainframe integration line of products, which required me to be a subject matter expert and evangelist.
- Maintained 24-hour availability by pager for Elite customers, ensuring they maintained maximum application uptime.
- Assisted with the development of a new technical research database, speeding TSE research into technical problems.
- Wrote the disaster recovery plan for the Attachmate support team in Seattle, identifying areas of risk and associated remediation paths.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), Mountain View, CA
Computer hardware and software manufacturer.
- Technical Support Engineer III, November, 2001, to April, 2003
- Technical Support Engineer II, June, 1998, to November, 2001 (Robert Half, Inc.)
- Resolved customer hardware and software problems, ensuring maximum uptime of customer systems.
- Helped customers resolve system crashes, configure system and network services, and install SGI software products, speeding their time to operation.
- Helped build the initial data set in a new Primus database, allowing Technical Support Engineerss to more quickly respond to customer issues.
- Documented software bugs based on situations brought by customers.
Black Rock City, LLC, dba Burning Man, San Francisco, CA
Very large scale annual event/art festival near Gerlach, NV
- Planning Section Chief, Emergency Services Department, 2005 - Present
- Fire Branch Deputy Chief, Emergency Services Department, 2002 - 2004
- Ranger Captain, Black Rock Rangers, 1999 - 2001
- Ranger, Black Rock Rangers, 1998
- Year-round volunteer, and paid staff during the event.
- Promoted to Captain my first year at the event, allowing other Ranger Captains to spread their workload.
- Moved to a leadership role in Emergency Services when those functions were split off from the Rangers. The split allowed the two skill and talent sets to do what they do best, without getting in each others' way.
- Wrote the original policies and procedures for fire prevention and mitigation at the event. This worked to minimize the risk of unintended fire damaging structures or vehicles
- Took on volunteer HR and check-in, volunteer outfitting, document preparation, and document management functions as Planning Section Chief in 2005. As with any volunteer organization, the workers must be well taken care of. As with any emergency services organization, if it wasn't documented, it didn't happen.
- Created a 250-line Excel spreadsheet for volunteer management in 2005. In 2007, I taught myself LAMP, and turned that spreadsheet into the year-round personnel database for Emergency Services.
Simplex Solutions, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Silicon chip verification and simulation software.
- System Administrator, March, 1997, to April, 1998
- Managed over 100 systems as the sole full-time system administrator.
- Ensured that the network and all systems were running and available for the development and sales teams at a small, start-up company.
- Designed, assembled, and tested a Wide Area Network connection to the company's Texas field office, expanding capability there.
- Designed and developed disaster contingency plans, to help ensure company viability following a major event.
Education
- University of California, Davis
- BA, Economics
- Mission College, Santa Clara, CA
- AS, Fire Science
Volunteering
- Volunteer Firefighter/EMT, South Kitsap (County, WA) Fire and Rescue
- Plans Section Chief, Emergency Services Department, Burning Man