J. Scott Hansen's CV

Email: scott@firecat53.net
Location: Lake Stevens, WA
GitHub: firecat53
LinkedIn: firecat53
Mastodon: @firecat53@firecat53.net

Summary

I am an experienced professional seeking a career change to a remote or hybrid position in Linux Administration. With over six years of contract development and Linux server administration for a small business and more than a decade of open-source development on personal GitHub projects totaling nearly 2000 stars, I bring a strong technical background. I am a passionate advocate for free and open-source software with over 20 years as a GNU/Linux user and administrator. Additionally, I have 25 years as a professional firefighter, including 2.5 years leading a diverse shift of 40 people as a Battalion Chief. My career has shown me to be a capable and respected team member and leader, thriving in fast-paced and high-pressure environments.

Experience

Bellingham Fire Department, Battalion Chief

1999 – present
Bellingham, WA
As Battalion Chief, responsible for leading a shift of 40 firefighter/EMTs and paramedics and managing all aspects of significant emergency incidents. Also responsible for team development, training, and facilitating communications between shifts and divisions.
Frequently act as technical liason with City IT, ensuring they understand the business needs and capabilities of the Fire Department.
Award for self-directed work on providing rapid access to building information for the Fire Captains.

The LogoCompany, Developer/Linux Administrator

2009 – 2016
Redmond, WA
Developed a Python/MySQL application to import and validate large CSV files of product data and submit those products for sale on eBay and Amazon.
Automated daily reporting of orders to be fulfilled on both platforms.
Generated over \$100,000 in gross annual sales for three consecutive years.
Created Ansible playbooks for deployment and maintenance of CentOS and Ubuntu servers for the business application, file server and backups.
Maintained Git code repository and detailed documentation for the software and hardware throughout my employment.

U.S. Navy, Lieutenant/Shift Engineer

1992 – 1998
Various
Directed operations, training, and maintenance of Navy nuclear power plants and submarines while supervising teams of up to 120 people as Watch Officer, Division Officer, and Engineer.

Projects

Homelab/Home Linux server administration

2007 – present
Over 17 years of managing all aspects of Linux servers in a homelab environment.
Networking and firewall administration (including pfSense), Nginx web server, Traefik reverse proxy.
Linux Command line, including utilities such as Vim and SSH.
Docker/Podman containerized services.
Ansible and NixOS for automating deployment of reproducible environments.
Active variously on Ubuntu, Arch and NixOS forums over the years providing assistance to new users.

Open-source development: https://github.com/firecat53

2011 – present
Collection of Dockerfiles that I developed for use with home servers. One of the earliest resources for home users after Docker started becoming popular. 627 Github stars.
Networkmanager-dmenu. Fast launcher frontend for controlling NetworkManager in minimal Linux desktop environments. 812 GitHub stars and 35 contributors.
Keepmenu. Fast launcher (Dmenu/Rofi etc.) frontend for password autotype and managing Keepass databases. 204 GitHub stars and 20 contributors.
Urlscan. Mutt TUI URL selector. 215 GitHub stars and 19 contributors.
Tabview. TUI CSV viewer. 459 GitHub stars and 10 contributors.
Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate with numerous diverse contributors and to submit clear, well-documented pull requests and issues to other open-source projects.

Technologies

Technologies: Ansible, Cloud (S3, B2, Digital Ocean, Linode), Docker, Git, NixOS, Podman, Restic, Traefik, ZFS
Languages: Python, SQL, Bash, Go, Nix, Ansible
Linux Distributions: AlmaLinux, Arch, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, NixOS, Ubuntu