Brian Sakal

  • Senior Full-Stack Developer, TorahAnytime.com, Flushing, NY
    June 2022–Present
    • Fixed/troubleshooted bugs and added features across multiple legacy codebases
    • Consolidated cloud resources by using Kubernetes.
    • Successfully transitioned a top-level domain from a self-hosted legacy site frontend by Cloudflare and nginx, to one hosted by Vercel, while maintaining custom routes that were handled by nginx and keeping the legacy site online under a subdomain.
    • Setup CI/CD pipelines with DroneCI and Gitlab; in addition to locally-runnable deploy scripts which reduced time-to-deployment from 5 minutes to 15 seconds.
    • Setup Clickhouse for analytics and as a read-only copy of MySQL data. Reduced query times from minutes to fractions of a second.
    • Implemented a revamped phone system using a finite-state machine. Content from the site is available and browsable by phone, dynamically.
    • Setup supporting services in Kubernetes, such as Gitlab, OpenTelemetry, a private Docker registry, a private NPM registry, Grafana, and others. Transcoder pipeline troubleshooting time was halved using OpenTelemetry tracing, with spans stored in self-hosted Clickhouse, visualized in Grafana.
    • Worked with (in no particular order): Node.js, Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, RethinkDB, Elasticsearch, Clickhouse, Docker, Nomad, Consul, Kubernetes, Helm, nginx, DigitalOcean Droplets, Vercel, S3, Cloudflare, Express.js, React, React Native, Next.js, Swagger
  • Assistant Manager, Sureknit Inc. Property Management, East Flatbush, NY
    February 2020–June 2022
    • Kept accurate records of tenant rent payments.
    • Balanced and monitored bank accounts for all subsidiary companies.
    • Furnished necessary documentation for various real estate operations, such as new leases, property sales, etc.
  • Operations Manager, Tax Opportunities America, Flushing, NY
    April 2014–May 2015
    • Interfaced with clients, prepared necessary documentation and submitted applications to government programs on behalf of clients.
    • Monitored and accommodated deadlines, missing client data, and when client promised to have the data available
  • Representative, Computer-Aided Engineering Network (CAEN) Hotline, U. of Michigan
    2007–2009, 2010–2011
    • Provided first-response assistance to students and collecting pertinent information to arrange for involvement of specialized staff.
  • Self-host email for the sakal.us domain Hosted on Vultr, uses Postfix for SMTP and Dovecot for IMAP.
  • Self-host a Kubernetes cluster Uses the k3s implementation. Various services are deployed within, including a private Docker image registry. TLS certificates for the Ingresses are handled by cert-manager. Private coding projects are also deployed within.
  • Self-host a Gitea code repository Deployed within the above Kubernetes cluster. Available at https://git.sakal.us
  • Calendar Optimizer project Stock options research platform. Frontend uses Preact, backend application layer uses trpc, database is Clickhouse. Available at https://calendar-optimizer-frontend.sakal.us.
  • Custom Full-Stack eCommerce website Created custom e-commerce website, both front-end and back-end, from scratch; previously at piazzaoptical.com (code at https://git.sakal.us/avraham/piazzaoptical.com). Frontend was implemented in mithril.js. For the backend, nginx was setup as reverse proxy and TLS termination; but the application code was implemented with LuaJIT using lua-http. The database was an LMDB KV store library running as part of the LuaJIT app server using lightningmdb Lua bindings; rolled-my-own wrapper around this so as to store JSON objects (in the form of compressed Lua tables using bitser).
  • Docker
  • DevOps (Logging, Monitoring, Grafana, CI/CD)
  • Kubernetes
  • Node JS
  • Javascript/Typescript
  • React
  • MySQL/PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • Clickhouse
  • Linux
  • Cloudflare
  • B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
    Sept. 2006–April 2009, Sept. 2010–April 2011, GPA 3.185