About

To start off, my name is Devin Leaman and I go by 4lch4/Alcha online. I’m a Software Engineer with a focus in DevOps and backend/CLI development and a love for automation.

I started my journey into programming in 2009, when I was 14 and took a class on GIS in high school. My teacher, Mr. Shin, taught the class in an unusual way by using Visual Basic to visualize data from ArcGIS. This was my first exposure to programming, and I was hooked. I spent the next few years learning more about programming and GIS, and eventually went to college to further my education in the field.

I went to the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and majored in Information Technology - Programming, learning mostly Java, COBOL, and SQL before graduating in 2015. One of my favorite memories was competing in an Acxiom Programming competition where me and a couple classmates competed against other colleges by solving problems with COBOL. We placed 2nd and it was an amazing experience where I learned to love competitive programming for the first time.

After getting my degree I moved to Benicia, CA and worked at SAPIEN Technologies, Inc. as a Jr. Software Test Engineer for a couple years. While there I was responsible for testing all new builds of our suite of products, in a variety of environments, converting the company iOS app to Android, and providing support for customers via the forums & premium support tickets.

For example, for every new build of a product I would test our software on both 32 & 64-bit iterations of Windows 7, 8, 10. This was before I knew much about writing tests so I performed these tests manually using a desktop with a hard drive for each OS.

Aside from testing software and providing support to customers, I also converted the company’s iOS app, iPowerShell, to Android. This was my first Android app I’d ever built and I learned a boat load about Java, Android, and the Android ecosystem.

After working at SAPIEN for a few years I moved back to Arkansas to be closer to family and started a job at J.B. Hunt. It’s no exaggeration to say I learned the most about everything involved with software development at an enterprise level while I worked there.

I started as a contractor who worked the night shift (18:00 - 06:00) on Wednesday - Friday/Saturday as a NOC Engineer. Because of how my shift was scheduled I was the NOC Engineer on duty when we did our monthly release cycle. This meant I was interfacing with all of our development teams on a regular basis to help improve their deployment processes.

Because of my experience with PowerShell, and the fact our Jenkins server lived off custom built PowerShell scripts, I became the de facto Jenkins admin for any issues it had. This was a great opportunity for me to learn more about Jenkins, Groovy, and automation at scale in general. While working overnight I would work directly with our overseas development team to help with any issues they faced when deploying via Jenkins.

After being hired on full-time I was moved to a more standard day shift schedule, working Monday - Friday (09:00 - 17:00) where I began to do more and more DevOps related tasks. I was responsible for working with our CICD team to maintain Jenkins, write new pipelines, and help with any issues that arose. I also worked with our development teams to help them write better tests, improve their deployment processes, and automate anything that could be automated.

To sum up, I ended my time at J.B. Hunt as a Sr. Operations Engineer and it was the greatest learning experience I’ve ever had. I’m beyond grateful for all of the things I was able to worked on and the people I was able to work with while I was there. The following provides some more highlights of my time there:

• Maintaining the infrastructure for our installations of Dynatrace and ExtraHop.
  • Dynatrace was hosted on a cluster of primary servers with numerous extra servers for various services.
  • ExtraHop was hosted on a special beast of a machine that connected to a lot of “sensor” servers.
• Working with the CICD team:
  • Build pipelines in Azure DevOps, as well as write custom scripts that would be used by all of the development teams during their deployment process.
  • Helped maintain our installation of Jenkins, wrote new scripts for deploying to new systems.
  • Maintained old scripts responsible for deploying legacy applications to legacy systems.
• Working with the SRE team to create a custom scorecard system for all of the applications and services across the enterprise.
  • This was a collection of batch/cron jobs that would gather metrics and display them using PowerBI.
  • I built it alongside a new member of the SRE team and then when it was complete I handed it off to them to maintain.
  • I worked with that SRE team member for a couple months to ensure things transitioned smoothly before moving on to other tasks.

After working for J.B. Hunt, I wanted something more DevOps focused instead of working DevOps on the side. Thankfully, one of my previous coworkers at J.B. Hunt had moved to a company called Liatrio and was able to get me an interview. I was hired on as a DevOps Engineer/Consultant and initially worked on the GitHub Practice team.

As part of the GitHub Practice team we were responsible for working with clients that wanted to migrate to GitHub Enterprise from other platforms. This meant migrating entire systems such as Azure DevOps, TargetProcess, etc., to GitHub Enterprise. We would also help clients with their CICD pipelines, writing new pipelines, and helping them with any issues they faced along the way.

I worked on the GitHub Practice team for a few months with a few clients before being moved to the Flywheel team, which was responsible for creating internal tools for the company that could be used for our clients. While on the Flywheel team I worked on Project Open O11y, which is where my love for the Go language began.

Open O11y is a project that aims to enable everyone to observe and improve their systems by providing a simple, easy to use, and easy to deploy observability stack. A component I was responsible for was the git provider in the Liatrio OTEL Collector . The git provider is a scraper that gathers metrics such as the amount of PRs/issues and their states, commit counts, etc., from GitHub and GitLab to be sent to something such as Prometheus and be displayed in Grafana.

As of April 2024 I’m working freelance gigs while looking for a new full-time position. I’m hoping to find something that will let me keep working in DevOps of some sort, but in reality as long as I can help with making and/or fixing things, I’m happy.

If you happen to know of a position that would suit me, please don’t hesitate to reach out using any of the methods listed below.