Dale Ragan

About Dale Ragan

I began programming at age 9 using a Commodore 64 that my Dad bought. From that day forward I was hooked on the ability to make my imagination reality. Required to become personally and financially independent immediately upon graduation from High School, I joined the Army and began my career in electronics/programming and have devoted substantial personal as well as professional time to programming and to the open-source community.I’ve gained valuable experience and skills from over 16 years of practical industry experience related to high availability systems, embedded system development, and cross-platform development. I’ve studied algorithms, language design, and operating system design on my own time and make practical use of that knowledge every day. I excel at conceptualizing the overall architecture of software and then executing that vision with the creation of code that is both efficient and elegant.I\'m currently passionate about building immutable, scalable, fault-tolerant, and reliable distributed systems across multiple cloud providers using end-to-end teams. How can we use the data generated in such systems to make our platforms smarter? Also, in open-source fashion, I give back to the next generation by teaching and mentoring anyone who wants to learn.I believe that DevOps is a culture and methodology, not a job title.

Experience

1. Principal Software Design Engineer

   Sap Concur

   May 2015 — Present · Bellevue, WA, US

   I help shape Concur’s engineering organization by leading projects to improve workflows and tooling for a variety of teams, managing and designing systems that have scaled with organizational growth, and building a culture of cross-team empathy and collaboration. I mentor other software engineers to raise the overall capabilities of the engineering team and to help guide younger employees in their software engineering careers.Receipt Service - https://developer.concur.com/api-reference/receipts/get-started.html - Controlled destiny of the service with a focus on performance and high availability- Used Docker to increase flexibility of deployments using agile and continuous-integration-based development process- Researched and created an immutable infrastructure based on Kubernetes targeting Amazon Web Services that can be spun up in a matter of minutes to improve reliability and flexibility- The flexibility and automation of the infrastructure and deployment was a key factor in reliability and performance testing as the service grew and deployed in multiple regions- Reached goal of maintaining a uptime while serving millions of requests.Scipian - https://github.com/scipian/community - Scipian can create and manage your infrastructure and then facilitate any workload on top of it without compromising on policy and security- Architected and drove vision of the project while mentoring two engineers with implementation.Faraday - Dev Environments re-imagined to facilitate development in a micro-service environment- Automated the creation of the existing monolith development VM to help teams focus on their service.

Education

• The Ohio State University

  Electrical Engineering

  1999 — 2005