Hire Chris Martin

Hello! I’m a generalist software and systems engineer with recent focus on Linux and web platforms. I enjoy building robust systems and healthy technical communities, deep troubleshooting, and removing incidental complexity from code and UIs. I enjoy working across the whole stack, from user research to building the feature and back again.

Want to talk? Email hire (at) cmart (period) today, or call/text +1 7 uno 6 - 6 cero 3 - 5 ocho 90.

Indicators of Mission, Values, and Culture Fit

Aspects of orgs I’m motivated to work for:

• Business models that align a company’s long-term incentives with its own users or clients, rather than with advertisers.
  • I think Fastmail and Kagi do a great job of this.
• Strong ties between engineering, product dev, and users.
  • Even if I’m doing back-end plumbing, I want to reach a shared understanding of how it enables the mission.
  • I admire companies who work with the garage door up. ¹
• A security mindset and culture of hygiene around handling personal / private data, even when not required by any particular regulatory or compliance regime.
• Asynchronous work culture and disciplined use of a ticketing (or similar work-tracking) system, even if the team works in-person.
  • A team that generally values writing things down (tradeoffs, decisions, plans, and processes).

Some efforts I find particularly motivating:

• Software that helps people deepen their attention and lengthen its span, despite the prevailing tech and media trying to fracture and divert users’ attention.
  • e.g. My side project Intentful.
• Software on the local-first spectrum.
• Improving the health of humanity’s information and sense-making commons.
  • Metascience, disintermediation of journalism, projects that rhyme with ‘fediverse’, Kagi’s sane AI Philosophy.
• Making non-proprietary operating systems and hardware more usable for everyday digital activities.
  • Imagine “the next Sandstorm or NextCloud”, or Vanilla OS.
• Making it easier for folks to burn less fossil fuels, and live a great life without daily car use.

Recent Achievements

I co-founded the Exosphere project, a user-friendly web client for interactive workloads on OpenStack-based clouds, written in Elm and Ansible. I led Exosphere’s early development and now co-maintain it. Exosphere is the primary UI for the National Science Foundation’s Jetstream2 research cloud. (See the code and docs.)

I created and continue to develop Jetstream2’s LLM Inference Service. We host the world’s most-capable open-weights LLMs with on-premises GPU hardware, and provide access free-of-cost to any US-based researcher via APIs and a ChatGPT-like web interface.

I created and now co-maintain Jetstream2’s usage accounting system (Python), disk image build pipeline (Ansible), resource scavenging automation (Python), and infrastructure monitoring/alerting system (Prometheus).

I was principal Investigator for a $298k NSF award to grow Exosphere’s open-source ecosystem.

Some More Things I’ve Built

• Intentful (Elm and JavaScript), a browser extension to help manage your focus in the digital attention economy. (Proof-of-concept, very sparse docs.)

• Code Commons, a weekly gathering of technologists at the University of Arizona.

• Tucson Code Works, a one-room downtown co-working space. (Closed permanently after a year trial.)

• A personal blog with a mix of serious writing and frivolity.

Work Experience

Indiana University — Bloomington, IN (remote)

Systems Engineer 2021 to present, contractor 2020 to 2021.

I develop and maintain Exosphere, a user-friendly web interface for OpenStack-based clouds. I guide and mentor project contributors, and serve as user support escalation. In 2022, Exosphere became the primary user interface of the Jetstream2 science and engineering research cloud, now with >2000 users. I am also the Principal Investigator of NSF award #2229642, which provides $298,000 to build Exosphere’s open-source ecosystem.

I also develop subsystems and integrations for Jetstream2, some of them publicly visible: the usage accounting system (Python), resource scavenging automation (Python), and the CI/CD pipeline to automatically customize, test, and publish system images for ~7 operating systems (Ansible and GitLab CI).

I also wrote an OpenStack Planning Guide and Automated Installation Guide for XSEDE Cyberinfrastructure Resource Integration (XCRI) group.

CyVerse at University of Arizona — Tucson, AZ

DevOps Engineer 2016 to 2019.

I designed, implemented, and supported systems for scientific computing workloads:

• OpenStack clusters totaling 1200+ cores at campus data center, built with OpenStack-Ansible.
• ½ petabyte Ceph cluster for mixed IOPS-heavy and throughput-heavy storage workloads.
• Prometheus and Grafana stack to monitor everything from overheating servers to API availability.

I assisted with development and support of Atmosphere (user-friendly client for OpenStack). I also consulted with community members (research scientists) to help them use CyVerse systems effectively. Further, I created metrics/analytics to plan capacity and show infrastructure usage to funding agencies.

Brightworks (later ICS, now TechMD) — Ithaca, NY

Systems Engineer 2019 to 2020

I automated internal systems to increase efficiency of support team and reduce their workload. I also provided highest-tier escalation for support issues.

Integration Engineer 2014 to 2016, and 2011 to 2014.

I built business technology solutions for clients in health care, education, telecommunications, finance, and other industries. I provided technical leadership for the complete project lifecycle. I upgraded and maintained a multi-tenant data center.

Education

In 2010 I received a Bachelor of Science, Informatics from University at Buffalo, with summa cum laude distinction.

Technologies I’ve Worked With

Bold indicates particularly strong experience:

• Web apps with Elm, HTML and CSS, JavaScript, Progressive Web Applications, Flask, Django, Hugo, Nginx, HAProxy, Let’s Encrypt.
• Development and scripting with Python; some bash, PHP, C, and PowerShell.
• DevOps with git, Ansible, and GitLab / GitHub.
• Production LLM hosting with vLLM, SGLang, and Open WebUI.
• Cloud data center automation with OpenStack, SNMP, IPMI, Prometheus, MaaS, SNMP
• Containers and virtualization with Docker, docker-compose, LXC, KVM / libvirt, VMware ESXi / vSphere.
• Storage with Ceph, hardware and software RAID, object storage (S3 / B2 / R2); backups with restic and many other tools.
• Software-defined networking with OpenStack Neutron, VXLAN / VLANs, infra-layer VPNs, iptables/ufw, Cisco IOS, pfSense, BGP.
• Server administration with Ubuntu and Debian, CentOS / RHEL, LDAP / Active Directory.
• Relational databases with PostgreSQL, MySQL / MariaDB, SQLite, various ORMs.
• Data analysis and visualization with Jupyter Notebook, Python / Pandas / matplotlib, R / ggplot2, Apache Superset, Grafana.

Technologies I Want to Learn

Open-minded! My mind works well with static type systems and pure functions, but I want to broaden my repertoire. If your team uses Rust, Go, Roc, Erlang/Elixir, Gleam, Scala, or Kotlin, then I definitely want to pick up your language.

FAQ

Where are you based? Willing to relocate?

Tucson, Arizona, USA, though I am evaluating other cities and open to relocating.

I have worked remotely either part- or full-time since 2016. I’m open to joining any sort of team from fully-remote to mostly-in-person. If I end up at a remote-first shop, I would hope to meet in-person with key colleagues on occasion. I value these interactions for building healthy team culture. My least-preferred option is a “pandemic-remote” shop trying to pull people (who mostly want to stay home) back into an office.

Willing to travel?

Yes, a few times a year is fine.

On-call okay / flexible hours?

Yes, I’ll serve in a sane on-call rotation. Open to adjusting hours, otherwise I would default to a Western US 08:30-17:30.

Where is your GitHub and LinkedIn?

My GitHub is here, though I’m a lot more publicly active here on GitLab, especially in the Exosphere and Jetstream Cloud namespaces. I’m also here on Codeberg. I don’t use LinkedIn or most other social media.

What is your battlestation?

It’s a Framework 13 running Debian Stable and PaperWM.

How do I talk to you?

Email hire (at) cmart (period) today, or call/text +1 7 uno 6 - 6 cero 3 - 5 ocho 90.