Curriculum Vitae

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Personal intro

Stefan's face
  • Year of birth: 1985
  • Year of first employment in IT: 2004
  • PDF version of CV: https://swehack.se/cv.en.pdf
  • Online version of CV: https://swehack.se/cv
  • Area of specialization: Linux and open source systems.
  • Spoken languages: Swedish, English, Croatian and some Danish.

My strengths are my seniority in the Linux and Unix ecosystem, natural problem solving ability, and familiarity with the open-source ecosystem.

I shine at designing and building solutions using open-source licensed software, that rival any proprietary alternative.

Job history

may 2011 - july 2024

Worked at Telia Cygate AB as a senior consultant specializing in all things Linux and open source.

This has been the most formative and most exciting employment of my career, I have been privileged to work with very large clients, from government owned institutions to regional governments and the health care sector.

I started by working with global clients involving Solaris, Puppet, FreeBSD, Debian, PXE deployments and very large clusters. The clients were spread out from Hong Kong to Europe to Los Angeles.

After that I continued more with local Swedish clients, building MySQL clusters, captive portal, PostgreSQL clusters, load balancers, managing Nagios, custom made backup and invoicing solutions. All the while solving problems for anyone who has a Linux server somewhere that is giving them trouble.

Throughout my employment I’ve been at the forefront of open source technology use at Cygate, for example by being the first to use gitops, the first to deploy our own on-prem Gitlab, the first to adopt Ansible, and among the first to use Terraform, containers and to deploy on-prem kubernetes.

I never let anyone define what I do, if there is a problem I solve it by any means necessary.

Even though I loathe working in the Microsoft ecosystem, I have been known to write Powershell scripts and migrate Active Directory controllers just to progress in my setup of connecting Linux clients to AD. Whatever it takes to get the job done.

Around 2019 I transitioned to DevOps with both in-house developers and external consultants. Supporting primarily Java and Golang services.

I would never want to work as a full-time developer, but my knowledge of programming helps me solve problems in operations, and have a better understanding of open source software and how to combine it into complex service designs.

Last few years I have had more of an architectural role in certain projects where I actually get to decide how to design something from beginning to end, document it, and then hand it over to our operations department.

2009 - may 2011

Worked at Stream Global Services in Helsingborg doing phone support for Dell PowerEdge servers. Did pretty well at this job, was often top ranked in our statistics.

This is where I got to work with Danish Dell customers on the phone. It was a struggle but I learned enough to know when even the most hardcore Jutlander needed their hard drives replaced.

2004-2008

First IT job was at Swebase AB, a small web hosting company run by a few guys out of Helsingborg. We used primarily FreeBSD but we’d use anything the customer required, including Fedora Core 4 and Windows Server 2003.

I was 19 when I started, a child by my standards today but looking back I still got a lot of things done and it was an invaluable learning experience.

For example I wrote a customer control panel in PHP where they could manage their own services. Very crudely stored DNS zones in PostgreSQL and used Cronjobs with Perl scripts to update backend data, so no modern job management like I would have used today.

You could find me taking phone calls from elderly end users needing help with Outlook, troubleshooting FreeBSD firewalls during ongoing DDoS attacks, SpamAssassin proxy filters, configuring IIS extensions or working on some code that could be Perl, PHP, or even C.

Education history

I never finished my secondary education (gymnasiet) in Sweden and went straight to working in Helsingborg.

2008-2009

Completed my secondary school grades at Helsinborg Folkuniversitet by taking a course called Tourism in the Øresund region. Among other classes did Danish 1 and Danish 2 for points.

The nerd in me shone through even here, when we were required to hand in work assignments in MS Word format. All I had was a FreeBSD laptop so I created a static HTML generator that would generate printer CSS to match the format of MS Word. So that when the document was printed it looked just like MS Word and the teachers happily accepted it.

Brief description of past projects

  • On-prem kubernetes clusters built with Terraform and Ansible.
  • PostgreSQL clusters using Patroni, pgBackRest for incremental backups and S3 for off-site storage.
  • Infrastructure as Code in Kubernetes using Helm, Kustomize and Ansible to manage manifests and operators.
  • Linux container hosts as appliances using CoreOS, Quadlets, and Terraform for Infrastructure as Code.
  • RHEL hardening using SElinux, and Ansible to follow the CISSP security standard.
  • Experience in using alternative container runtimes, other than just Docker, like Podman and runc.
  • Experience in containerizing applications written in Python, Golang and other languages.
  • Have worked with multiple cloud providers like Linode, Digitalocean, AWS and Azure.
  • Managing cloud resources with Terraform.
  • Provided DevOps to developers using languages like Java, Golang and dotnet.
  • Extensive experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for said languages.
  • GitOps in on-prem Gitlab with CI/CD pipelines.
  • Experience with system integration between proprietary APIs using Python and oAuth.
  • Current experience with full-stack observability using Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus.
  • Past experience with Nagios and Zabbix monitoring.

Example projects

Here are some projects where I demonstrate some of my skills.