About
Let me introduce myself.
I began my career working in a local computer repair store saving motherboards from wine spills and soldering long enough for the fumes to give me headaches. After graduating with an associates in CSS I began working as a Systems Engineer. After about 3 years of server and network administration, I took on a more devops associated role and have been building projects, programming, automation and CI/CD pipelines ever since.
Profile
- Fullname: Collin Robert Pendleton
- Job: Devops Engineer at 3rt Networks
- Website: www.collinpendleton.com www.gooseberrydevelopment.com
- Email: collinp@collinpendleton.com
Skills
I'm constantly building my skills through personal projects and continually learning new technologies that I can leverage in my devops journey. Here's a list of topics I'm currently learning. Things I'm proficient with are listed below under proficiencies.
Proficiencies
Here's what I bring to the table.
- Python
- Git/Github - Github Actions
- Docker/Docker Compose
- Linux/Bash Commands
- Windows/Windows Server
- html/css
- Prometheus & Grafana/Greylog
- Nginx/Reverse Proxies/Load Balancing
- VSCode/Vim/Nano/Jetbrains
- Routers and Firewalls
- Network Protocols
- Networks Switches
- Powershell
- Security Best Practices
- Vsphere/ESXI
- Terraform
- Netlify
- Agile Development
- Ansible
- SQL - MariaDB, MySQL
- Exchange/365
- Email Administration
- Jenkins
- Gitlab CI/CD
- Azure/Azure AD
- Virtualization Concepts
- Scripting
- Testing Automation
- Containerization Concepts
- DNS/DHCP
- Data Backup Concepts
- Packer
- Vagrant
- Tailscale/Wireguard
- Vercel
- Strong Devops Oriented Mindset
Resume
More of my credentials.
At this point I've been in the industry for over 7 years and I've managed to make quite an impact. Moving from a repair tech to network engineer before finally breaking into systems administration and Devops Engineering. In less than a year in that role I managed to gain enough knowledge and experience to be promoted to a senior level position.
Work Experience
Devops Engineer
July 2021 - Present
3rt Networks
A new beginning for my career. At 3rt I was immediately driven to learning as much as I possibly could about automation of the concepts I learned at Adoni. With a much larger customer base comes an inherent need to automate much of the work. I began to take those concepts learned at Adoni and manage them with tools like Ansible and Jenkins. I began building a code base to handle much of these tasks. My career has turned into learning and utilizing Python, Ansible, Containerization, and other config file technologies that can be easily scripted. I've began building web servers that can display information pulled using pipelines on an organized dashboard. I made it a goal to turn much of our manual information gathering into automated tasks.
Network Engineer
August 2018 - July 2021
Adoni Networks
My position right after college. I learned to administrate systems in this role accross an entire network. From switches to servers to firewalls and access points, I was exposed to just about everything and learned to administrate everything needed to run a network. I personally managed the entire infrastructure for several of our customers. At Adoni I also learned modern server concepts such as virtulization, and containerization. By the end of my time there I was doing some minor management and was the escalation point.
Repair Tech
June 2015 - August 2018
Orange Computer Solutions
This was my position immediately out of high school. I was fortunate enough to step right into the IT industry right out of high school. Giving me a head start even before college. At orange I learned computer fundamentals, hardware, soldering, and was introduced to the world of linux. I daily drove a Linux OS thoughout college and based many of my college projects on Linux based projects.
Education
Github Actions Certification
November 2023
Github
While at Github Universe 2023 I was able to receive the official Github Actions Certification, which was brand new at the time. This certification tests for proficiency in building CI/CD, automating workflows, and optimizing software pipelines, all within the context of Github Actions.
LPIC-1 Linux Administration Certification
June 2022
Linux Professional Institute
At 3rt I immediately made it a goal to dive far deeper in Linux as a concept. I knew that much of my automation work could be made much easier with the configuration file type setup that the linux community embraces. I also saw the importance of Linux in the Devops world for the majority of the Automation technologies that I use everyday. LPIC-1 taught me everything I need to know in order to administrate any kind of Linux server. I'm an adept Linux user, and use Linux everyday.
Associates Degree
September 2015 - December 2018
Western Technical College
At Western I recieved a Computer Support Specialist Associates Dregree. I took classes in Powershell Scripting, SQL, basic web design, Windows Server administration, Cisco fundamentals, and Java. It gave me an early start in much of the programming concepts and coding that I do on a daily basis today.
High School Diploma
September 2011 - June 2015
Westby Area High School
I started out early in high school taking an interest in the IT field. I took a few classes on some basic programming and basic computer science.
Portfolio
Check Out Some of My Works.
I open source everything I can, and for much of what I can't, I build similar projects in my free time in order to still contribute to the open source community. I love to build programs that serve a basic function we often use but don't think much about. Take a simple alarm clock for example.
Packer - Terraform Server Pipeline
This is my solution to full automation of server builds for an MSP multi-client setup. Finding examples for how people automated vm deployments to server environments online is pretty easy. Turning that process into automating vm deployments across several different vcenter environments in entirely different unconnected networks while staying secure is an entirely different story. My solution is innovative, and one that I hope can help others facing the same problem. Read my blog post for more.
Report Site
Previously, we'd have quite a few people manually assess systems at client sites for general issues, license expiries, and security problems. We'd then make individual work documents reporting on each device. I saw an oppurtunity there, and made it a goal of mine to automate as much of that process as possible. So I created our reporting site. It begins with a Jenkins job for the assessment of choice and then runs through quite the gambit of processes. It begins by creating a container instance to run an ansible job on the client site of choice. Ansible uses kerberos to authenticate with whatever computers it needs to or potentially ssh if it's a network device. Ansible will then run infomration gathering commands on the device in question, pull that data back to the server it's running on, and then remove any files it created when running. From there, Jenkins will run a php script on either a csv or txt file that it now has to convert that information into an html document formatted in the way seen above. From there, it scps the html document to the reports webserver in a specific location defined by variables and then send a clickable link to the assessment to the person who needs to recieve it in an email. This entirely prevents any human interaction at all if we scedule the job to run. I built this system to be adaptable as possible as well, so with minor changes in the commands we run this can gather information from Active Directory, to Excahnge servers, to Backup systems, to network devices like switches and firewalls. All it needs is a txt or csv file.
Pinepods
Pinepods is a complete podcasts management system that allows you to play, download, and keep track of podcasts you enjoy. It allows for searching new podcasts using The Podcast Index and provides a modern looking UI to browse through shows and episodes. In addition, Pinepods provides simple user management and can be used by multiple users at once using a browser or app version. Everything is saved into a Mysql database including user settings, podcasts and episodes. It's fully self-hosted, and I provide an option to use a hosted API or you can also get one from the podcast API and use your own. There's even many different themes to choose from! Everything is fully dockerized and I provide a simple guide found below explaining how to install Pinepods on your own system.
Computer Onboarding Script
I wrote this quick onboarding script to save time for the service desk by automating a large chunk of the onboarding process for new computers. It also prevents us from missing the install of tools for our clients. Typically, I would build applications using something like a python GUI builder, but in this case I needed to ensure the onboard program would run without problem on a brand new install of windows. For that reason, I went with simple powershell forms. The app installs all the applications we install on new client machines, joins computers to an active directory domain, and can rename computers. It pulls the client specific installers from a containerized file repository I built and exposed via reverse proxy.
Cecil
Cecil is my answer to health checks/monitoring of client infrastructure. The statically generated reports site builds some nice reports for clients to utilize however, we were missing a platform that can monitor devices, infrastructure, and network health. Cecil is a dockerized web application that gets deployed to client sites to a central container server that spins up a flutter web app. This application can be accessed from the client network at the ip of the container server and requires authentication to access using the internal company github for API access tokens. Once logged in you can setup 'modules'. Cecil is built as agnostically as possible and simply provides a framework in which further modules can be easily integrated on top of it to run additional monitors/alerts. These modules are simply python scripts that retrieve information. That information is then sent back to cecil where it forwards over https protocol using a load balancer to a central ntfy server. The ntfy server organizes the data and emails a ticket in to either alert, or provide a report.
CAMM - Collin's Automated Machine Monitor
This is a fun little project I took up to handle the automation of a seemingly simple, yet time consuming issue we ran into with many clients. The scenario is this, we would onboard a client, get our tools ready (RMM, antivirus, etc.), and then have no way of knowing every the hostnames of every computer to deploy computers to. CAMM, was built to overcome this issue. CAMM is a python program I built that is containerized and can be deployed to a client site to monitor the network for any computers it finds on the network. It scans every so often and will add new computers it finds to a list. If after 60 days a computer is not seen it will be removed from the list. This allows us to keep an up to date list that we can automatically feed into an ansible hosts file for example to deploy tools too.
Open Sourced Mindset
I love helping out with open source projects and am willing to always help out where ever possible. Contact me if you think I can help out with your project.
Contact
I'd Love To Hear From You.
Shoot me an email with requests for help, job inquires, to give me ideas, to offer advice, or just to say hi.
Email Me At
collinp@collinpendleton.com
collinpendleton@gooseberrydevelopment.com