Curriculum vitae

Jan Brauer
Thadenstr. 56
22767 Hamburg

Tel: +491778101913
Mail: mail@janbrauer.com

How I roll

I like things fast. I’m easily bored. I like to think about what’s next. I have no clue about frontend. I’m easily excited and contagiously exciting. Customer value first. No software is better than no software. I enjoy baking. I play drums. I suck at playing keyboards. I have kids. I enjoy hard problems. I hate working alone. I say yes but no a lot. I once gave a talk. I collect reggae vinyl. And cook books.

Work Experience

2017 - present superluminar GmbH

• Co-founded AWS consulting company, now ~18 people.
• Hands-on consulting: architecture, implementation, knowledge transfer.
• Built and open-sourced super-eks, a batteries-included EKS installer.
• Customer projects include serverless IoT platforms, ML prediction APIs, multi-account setups.
• AWS CDK, Lambda, EKS/Kubernetes, API Gateway, IoT Core, CI/CD pipelines.
• Identity management, API design, authorization systems.
• Selected writing on the company blog:
  • super-eks: Ein EKS-Installer auf CDK-Basis
  • AWS Lambda mit Java, Gradle und dem CDK
  • AWS-Architekturdiagramme mit PlantUML erstellen
  • Nachhaltige und sichere AWS-Umgebungen (mit Sönke Rümpler)
  • Eine Deploy-Pipeline mit AWS CodePipeline

2010 - 2017 Jimdo GmbH

• Design, implement and roll out HTTPS for 500K user domains using Let’s Encrypt
• Team Lead Platform Engineering
• Migrated infrastructure from use of images to containers (AMI -> Docker).
• Replaced Vagrant developer system with Docker.
• Refactored Jenkins setup using Docker and DSL plugin to be fully versioned.
• Part of SRE team being on call for the platform.
• Planned and executed migration of ~200 physical servers from three different colocations to Amazon AWS.
• Designed and implemented MySQL database migration to Amazon RDS, designed and implemented sharding strategy.
• Introduced new monitoring tool Prometheus to replace Nagios.
• Implemented and designed a search interface for back office components based on Apache Solr.
• Implemented and designed an authentication system for APIs.
• Implemented and designed the APIfication of the whole backend for use with mobile clients using Apache Thrift.
• Implemented and designed an API router to expose legacy components via an API.
• Reimplemented Google’s closure compiler service for faster JavaScript minification.
• Refactored shop component to internationalize tax calculation.
• Replaced monolithic test server with Vagrant developer boxes.
• Introduced a deployment pipeline for continuous deployment.
• Introduced acceptance tests based on Cucumber and Selenium.
• Introduced a CI environment using Jenkins.

2006 - 2010 CoreMedia AG

• Developed social software extensions, among them a backend for moderating user content for a well known German news paper.
• Developed a micro blogging platform called Trillr based on Django.
• Migrated the build system from Ant to Maven (50+ modules).
• Developed a web based CMS editor toolkit based on Spring and JSF.
• Developed GUI installer for the CMS platform.
• Integrated/migrated internal bugtracker to JIRA.

1998 - 2006 Various student jobs

System administration and user support for S24 Direkt, travelchannel.de and CoreMedia.

Skills

• Languages:

  • Bash
  • Clojure
  • Go
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
• Open source contributions:
  • aws-cdk (MSK and self-managed Kafka Lambda event sources; KAFKA auto-scaling namespace)
  • riemann (Nagios integration)
  • packer (Puppet master integration)
  • confd (DynamoDB backend)
  • thrift (various compiler patches)
  • prometheus_client_php (co-author and maintainer of the PHP instrumentation library, 281★)
• Tools and concepts:
  • agile development (Scrum, Kanban and whatever works)
  • cloud computing (esp. Amazon AWS)
  • configuration management (Ansible and Puppet)
  • continuous integration (Jenkins et.al.)
  • deployment pipelines
  • complex build systems
  • APIs (authentication, documentation, rate limiting etc.)
  • data driven decisions
  • Debian flavoured linux
  • Docker
  • monitoring (Prometheus and Nagios/Icinga)
  • requirements engineering
  • RPC vs REST
  • software testing
  • user stories
  • team facilitation, retrospective moderation
  • dealing with legacy codebases

Education

1999 - 2007 University of Hamburg, Computer Science, Diploma

Focus on Interactive Media and Virtual Environments. Thesis on “A chair based interface for controlling desktop applications”