Brian Sakal

  • Senior Full-Stack Developer, TorahAnytime.com, Flushing, NY
    June 2022–Present
    • Transitioned a legacy Cloudflare/nginx TLD site to Vercel, while maintaining custom nginx routes on the TLD, plus the entire legacy site under a subdomain.
    • Reduced time-to-deployment from 5 minutes to 15 seconds with locally-runnable deploy scripts; besides setting up Drone/Gitlab CI/CD pipelines.
    • Architected custom analytics backend w/ Clickhouse. Reduced query times from minutes to milliseconds.
    • Implemented a custom IVR phone system to dynamically browse content.
    • Setup various supporting/ancillary services in Kubernetes, including Gitlab, OpenTelemetry, private Docker & NPM registries, Grafana.
    • Implemented OpenTelemetry tracing visualized in Grafana, decreasing transcoder troubleshooting by 50%.
    • 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
  • 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 Both front-end and back-end from scratch; previously at piazzaoptical.com (code at https://git.sakal.us/avraham/piazzaoptical.com). Frontend in mithril.js. Backend w/ nginx as reverse proxy and TLS termination; application code in lua-http on LuaJIT. Database was an LMDB KV store exposed with custom wrapper using lightningmdb Lua bindings; stored JSON objects w/ references (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