colin@colino.net

System/devops engineer

Colin Leroy-Mira
colin@colino.net
Toulouse, France

Who I am

Huge geek since my childhood, I have started working in IT at 19, first as a developer then as a sysadmin. I love making things work, learning new things, investigating and fixing problems, sharing what I learn, and the free software ecosystem is the place where I love to do all that.

Professionally I have chosen to work in places where I could at least use free software daily, and personally I have contributed to dozens of projects, from very little hobby projects to the Linux kernel or the glibc, since more than twenty years. In particular I acted as co-maintainer of Claws-Mail for about a decade, before gradually stepping out of the role as children arrived and familial responsibilities grew.

I am looking for a systems/devops engineer role where I can do what I love most: make things work, make them work well (preferably in a repeatable, self-documented manner), and work together with smart and nice people, including maintainers from other projects, to make everybody’s life easier.

When I’m not in front of a computer, I like bicycling, climbing, reading and spending time with my family.

Professional experience

  • February 2020 – now : Sigfox / Unabiz , senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE). 0g radio communication, “Internet of things”
    • Infra as Code and deployment automation, on premise and in the cloud (GCP, Ansible, Terraform)
    • Monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, AlertManager, Grafana, Elastic, Zabbix – definition of relevant metrics in cooperation with development teams, implementation, documentation of incident resolution procedures, etc.)
    • Scalability and high availability of web facing applications (Java Springboot / nginx) and their supporting infrastructure (MongoDB, Kafka, Kubernetes, etc.)
  • July 2011 – February 2020 : i-Run , Toulouse – Devops Manager. Running/fitness e-commerce website.
    • Development and maintainance of a high-performance e-commerce website (tens of thousands of visits per day) in Java with Nginx , Varnish , Apache , Tomcat , Velocity, Velosurf and MySQL ;
    • Implementation of a distributed architecture designed to minimize the impact of a failure (web front ends, static content servers, caching proxies, database replication, Heartbeat/DRBD high availability, etc.) and a disaster recovery plan;
    • Fixed bugs and memory leaks in the Velosurf project , allowing the site’s performance to be tripled; most of these have been upstreamed.
    • Infra as Code: Repeatable Deployments with Ansible and Docker;
  • April 2005 – June 2011 : Seanodes – System & Network Administrator. Startup of 31 people, editor of a software-based clusterized block device, Exanodes.
    • Architecture: definition of needs, choice and implementation of different technologies, scaling of initial solutions (from 25 to 160 servers);
    • Infrastructure management: automation with in-house solutions mostly based on PXE, Kickstart, PHP intranet;
    • User support;
    • Virtualization (Xen, VMWare);
    • Suppliers management
  • September 2000 – April 2005: Developer at various startups
    • C, Java, PHP
  • Summers 2000 and 1999 : Internships – INRIA.
    • Creation of two intranets in Java servlets, intended for the HR department, and for the management of budget requests from project managers.

“Soft” skills

I consider important to listen and adapt to the people I need or want to work with, and consider there is always something to learn from others. I also think that it is important to share knowledge with people who want to learn, and that nothing is gained by gatekeeping.

I can even adapt and work with rude people on certain occasions (it is easier with my privileges), like if I need a patch upstreamed, but of course, I prefer not to.

Technical skills

  • System :
    • Very good knowledge of server software: Apache, Postfix, Bind, OpenLDAP, MySQL, dhcpd, dnsmasq, NFS, Varnish, Nginx, Heartbeat, DRBD, LVM, and their administration under Linux distributions such as Debian, RedHat etc.
    • Automation, IaaC: very good knowledge of Ansible, Terraform, docker
    • Knowledge of Kubernetes
  • Network :
    • Very comfortable at 5 out of the 7 OSI layers. No previous experience with BGP or AS-level networking.
  • Programming :
    • good at C: programming under Linux (kernel, GUI with GTK+, CLI), debug with gdb and Valgrind
    • Java: good knowledge
    • Web-oriented languages: good at PHP, Javascript, (X)HTML and CSS.
    • 65c02 assembly, for fun.
    • Able to understand (and patch) codebases in various languages.