David Chandler

Background

About David Chandler

My passion is to help my team work smarter, not harder. When I fix a problem, I ensure it does not need fixing again; when there is tedious work, I automate it; when a colleague needs a fish, I teach them to catch it then update the fishing documentation. Over my ten years in technology, my work has been informed by the bigger picture - understanding where my talents fit in and where I can amplify the efforts of the entire team. When I started at Rackspace, my basic function was triaging a queue of monitoring alerts, which I quickly identified as problems to be solved categorically, rather than individual tasks. I set to work developing scripts to more effectively churn through the mundane tickets, which afforded me and my team time for additional diligence in the meaningful work of troubleshooting and root cause analysis. My reputation for automation, tool development, and identifying bottlenecks earned me leadership of a task force, where we addressed technical debt in the tools used by front-line support staff and created a handful of new ones that were sorely needed. I also love getting into the innards of complex systems and figuring out how to make them run more smoothly. Among my accomplishments was a refactor of a Python tool used thousands of times a day by my peers to easily login to, assess, and make bulk changes to customer servers. My changes untangled the code, simplified the API abstractions, modularized it to be usable as a library, and extended its non-code interfaces to allow for more flexible usage on the fly. This laid the groundwork for an explosion of development and extension after years of stagnation. Specialties: Linux Systems Automation via Ansible and Shell Scripts, Timely Troubleshooting, Tracing Breadcrumbs, Log Parsing and Interpretation, Effective Google Searching