About

To start off, my name is Devin Leaman and I go by 4lch4/Alcha online. I’m a DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer with a background in backend and 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 SAPIEN I started freelancing as 4lch4 Industries, LLC, building mobile-friendly websites for small businesses, before joining J.B. Hunt in 2019.

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.

In 2019 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, a title the company later renamed to Software Engineer III. It was the greatest learning experience I’ve ever had. I’m beyond grateful for all of the things I was able to work 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.
  • Removing redundant, never-configured backup servers from the inherited Dynatrace cluster, which cut about $10K/month in Azure costs.
  • Maintaining the Dynatrace tagging that was the source of truth for application ownership in cloud cost-allocation reports.
• Monitoring and helping manage a 250+ node production Kubernetes cluster, first on AKS and later on GKE.
• Working with the CICD team:
  • Building pipelines in Azure DevOps and writing custom scripts that would be used by all of the development teams during their deployment process.
  • Building Helm-based rollback into our CI/CD and setting up deploy gates with SonarQube and health checks.
  • Taking part in disaster recovery (DR) failover.
  • Helping move teams from Jenkins to Azure DevOps.
  • Helping maintain our installation of Jenkins and writing new scripts for deploying to new systems.
  • Maintaining old scripts responsible for deploying legacy applications to legacy systems.
• Administering the Rave Alert paging platform and using its API to automate data updates.
• Building tooling for the NOC and Service Desk.
• Working with the SRE team on a custom scorecard system for all of the applications and services across the enterprise.
  • The scorecard used Power BI, SQL Server, and Azure Functions to score every product from Dynatrace, SonarQube static code analysis, and Azure DevOps data.
  • 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. We would also help clients with their CICD pipelines, writing new pipelines, and helping them with any issues they faced along the way. I led a GitHub Enterprise best-practices workshop.

I also worked on a migration of about 20,000 work items from TargetProcess to Azure DevOps. I handled pagination, retries, and rate limits, and used Redis to track which items had been migrated so a run could resume after a problem instead of starting over.

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 OpenO11y, which is where my love for the Go language began.

OpenO11y is Liatrio’s open-source OpenTelemetry Collector distribution, written in Go, and it aims to enable everyone to observe and improve their systems with a simple, easy to deploy observability stack. I worked on its git provider receiver, a scraper that gathers metrics such as the number 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. I added GitLab branch metrics and GitHub project filtering to it, built out its test coverage, and gave clients live demos of it.

From December 2024 through December 2025 I worked at Tundra Technical Solutions as a Data Labelling Analyst III, contracted to Meta for AI data annotation. I reviewed AI model conversations for quality and accuracy, including some review of LLM-generated code.

I still run 4lch4 Industries, LLC, the freelance business I started in 2018. I work on virtually any tech problem someone needs fixed to keep my skills fresh and earn money while I look for full-time work.

A few things I’m working on right now:

• Shion is my alerting hub: any agent, site, or scheduled job can call it, and it delivers the alert to Discord.
• Infrastructure is my OpenTofu and Terragrunt setup for managing my DigitalOcean droplets.
• LiveKit Demo is an on-call voice agent that checks my servers and pages me through Shion.
• Model Launch Check is a CLI that compares LLM latency, tokens, and cost across providers.
• AI-Usage is a Windows tray app that shows my Claude and OpenCode Go usage, with an Android widget in progress.

I live in Benicia, CA. I’m looking for a DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer role in the SF Bay Area (hybrid) or anywhere in the US (remote). If you know of something that fits, my contact info and resume are just below.