About

Hello. I’m Brian Shumate, an engineer and educator with a passion for building interactive educational experiences and tools and open source software.

Design and development

Design and design thinking, along with software development and engineering have remained constant themes throughout my career and personal life. I’ve studied and implemented practical design in practice through everything from content management and knowledge sharing systems, to distributed databases, to interactive map experiences that scaled to handle millions of users.

I’ve also worn different hats to support the development of open source software and commercial products that you may have heard of, such as:

• Vault
• Boundary
• Consul
• Terraform
• Nomad
• Packer
• Vagrant
• Couchbase
• Riak
• Drupal
• Ubuntu

among others.

I fight for the user

I have consistently and compassionately advocated for learners, users, customers, and colleagues alike throughout my professional career. I enjoy continuous learning, and sharing knowledge with others to empower their journeys. In this way, I like to approach my work with the spirit of a concept I took from the original TRON: I am fighting for the user.

Operations & FreeBSD

I know a fair bit about classic Unix and Linux systems administration, but also I’m also deeply experienced with DevOps, automation, containerization, continuous integration, distributed systems, virtualization, and centralized secrets management.

I’ve been a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix fan since the mid 1990s, when I first encountered mentions of it in Byte Magazine.

I began my personal journey as root on FreeBSD version 2.2.5, and I have also used NetBSD and OpenBSD on a range of platforms for many years. As Kelsey Hightower hilariously mentions in his fantastic HashiConf 2017 Keynote, I am literally one of those people from the 90s with a FreeBSD tattoo!

Radio frequency energy

You can sometimes find me on the air as K4APP, a licensed General Class amateur radio operator in the USA. I enjoy all kinds of RF and signals, particularly those which originate from or otherwise traverse space.

Geek Code

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