Welcome! I’m Robert, a seasoned software developer with a passion for systems design, spatial data, and photography. You can check out my photos on Flickr and Unsplash.

Connect with me:

My areas of expertise include:

> Windows administration

With a strong background in Windows administration, I am proficient in IIS, Active Directory, and domain controllers. I am skilled in scripting DOS and PowerShell as needed.

> Linux administration

Experienced in managing Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Amazon Linux 2, and Arch on remote and local machines. I am well-versed in Bash, SSH, GPG, TMux, Vim, grep, sed, and, more.

The terminal doesn’t scare me.

> Languages

Proficient in Bash, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, VB.NET, VBA, SQL, PL/pgSQL, and some Python

> Frameworks

Node.js

ASP.NET, especially MVC and .NET Core. I stared developing .NET apps at version 1.1.

React + Redux, dva + umi, Angular + Ngrx, AngularJS, Gatsby, and Vue

For UI/CSS, I prefer the utility classes approach made popular by Tailwind - often combined with a components library like Mantine or Rediux.

> GIS

Having started my career in GIS in 2003, I have extensive expertise in Esri ArcGIS Desktop, Server, 3D Analyst, Spatial Analyst, Network Analyst, and APIs. I’ve also worked with QGIS, PostGIS, Leaflet, TileMill, Carto, and low-level tools like GDAL, proj.4, and OGR to build production systems on open-source GIS software.

> Web hosting

AWS, Azure, GCP, Firebase, Heroku, Azure, GoDaddy, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel

> Virtual environments and containers

Docker, VMWare and ESXi, Oracle VirtualBox, Parallels and Vagrant

> Editors

Visual Studio, VS Code, and Vim/Neovim:

> Source control

Expert working knowledge of Git.

Previously, I have used Mecurial, TFS, SVN, and Visual Source Safe.

> DevOps

I have informally served as a DevOps engineer in various roles, with experience in webpack, Grunt, Gulp, MSBuild, TFS, VSTS, Mecurial (hg), Git, Hudson/Jenkins CI, Slack, Atlassian Bitbucket/Jira/Bamboo, GitHub Actions, GitLab CE, Docker Compose, Vagrant, unit testing frameworks, Bash, PowerShell, and more.

> Data and networking

Redis, NGINX, Let’s Encrypt, Docker, Docker Compose, SQLite, SQL Server, and Postgres.

GraphQL and REST, with or without Open API.

> Cloud computing and security

My primary expertise is in AWS, where I have managed a network of servers and services since 2012:

  • Route 53 (DNS routing),
  • VPC (virtual private networking),
  • S3 and Glacier (storage and static file hosting),
  • CloudFront (content delivery and caching),
  • Lambda (event-driven, serverless computing),
  • IAM (accounts management),
  • RDS (relational databases),
  • ElastiCache (application caching, NoSQL database),
  • Elastic Beanstalk (infrastructure orchestration, PaaS),
  • ECS (Docker container hosting and deployment),
  • SES and SNS (email and notifications),
  • CloudWatch (logging, metrics),
  • CodePipeline and CodeDeploy (build procedures and deployments),
  • Certificate Manager (SSL cert management),
  • IAM user management, encryption options, two-factor auth, security groups, and more.

I have real-world experience designing architectures that use dynamic auto-scaling, load balancing, fault tolerant capabilities of AWS, and I have a good general knowledge of networking and troubleshooting in such environments.

> Security

My PGP public key is 0x6AF2BF57992F19ED.

https://keybase.io/robert_claypool

Terms and conditions

This blog was made to distribute valuable info and show off my recent work. To that end, I license the content under CC BY 4.0.

Source code I publish here is placed under The MIT License unless otherwise noted. I avoid reposting code that’s not mine without proper attribution, but please be careful to distinguish what is mine and what is not.

If you have a doubt about the ownership or terms of anything on this site, email me at robert-claypool@outlook.com