apricote.de/data/resume.yaml

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsonresume/resume-schema/v1.0.0/schema.json
basics:
  name: Julian Tölle
  label: Infrastructure & Backend
  image: https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/bd55c8a01a6dd038f86c8e9fd60674b5?s=800
  email: julian.toelle97@gmail.com
  location:
    city: Bielefeld
    countryCode: Germany
  profiles:
    - network: GitHub
      username: apricote
      url: https://github.com/apricote
    - network: LinkedIn
      username: Julian Tölle
      url: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-toelle/
    - network: Twitch
      username: Apricote4
      url: https://twitch.tv/apricote4
    - network: XING
      username: Julian_Toelle3
      url: https://www.xing.com/profile/Julian_Toelle3/cv

skills:
  - name: Kubernetes
    level: expert
    keywords:
      - Cluster API
      - Operators
      - GitOps

  - name: Node.js
    level: expert
    keywords:
      - Typescript
      - Nest.js

  - name: CI/CD
    level: advanced
    keywords:
      - GitLab CI
      - Jenkins

  - name: Infrastructure as Code
    level: advanced
    keywords:
      - Terraform
      - Ansible

  - name: Backend Development
    level: advanced
    keywords:
      - REST APIs

  - name: Cloud
    level: advanced
    keywords:
      - AWS
      - OpenStack
      - Hetzner Cloud

  - name: Databases
    level: advanced
    keywords:
      - Redis
      - PostgreSQL
      - MySQL
      - etcd

  - name: Go
    level: intermediate
    keywords:
      - kubebuilder

work:
  - name: Hetzner Cloud GmbH
    position: Software Developer Open Source Integrations
    website: https://hetzner.com/cloud
    startDate: "2022-11"
    keywords:
      - Kubernetes
      - Terraform
      - Ansible
      - Go
      - Python
    summary: ""
  - name: teuto.net Netzdienste GmbH
    position: Cloud Engineer
    website: https://teuto.net/
    startDate: "2021-04"
    endDate: "2022-09"
    keywords:
      - Kubernetes
      - Cluster API
      - OpenStack
      - GitLab CI
      - GitOps
      - Prometheus & Alertmanager
      - Go
      - kubebuilder
      - Ansible
    summary: |-
      teuto.net provides public and private clouds based on OpenStack,
      managed Kubernetes on top of these clouds, and additional services like
      consulting or training. Within teuto.net, I worked on the Kubernetes team,
      where I was responsible for the next iteration of our managed Kubernetes
      offering.

      At the beginning of 2021, teuto.net decided to replace the existing custom
      tooling for managing Kubernetes clusters with Cluster API and Cluster API
      Provider OpenStack. I authored a proposal for the new implementation and
      implemented it over the following months. This included GitLab CI
      pipelines for building VM images, writing templates for clusters, an
      Ansible playbook to bootstrap new Cluster API Management Cluster,
      extensive internal documentation and runbooks, Prometheus alerting, an E2E
      test pipeline, and a custom Kubernetes operator to tie it all together
      into one coherent API.

      As I always liked to work upstream, and a stable foundation is necessary
      for this offering, I started contributing to Cluster API Provider and
      became a reviewer for the project, participating in the office hours and
      wherever else help was needed.

      When not working on new features, I packaged newly released Kubernetes
      versions for our platform and rolled out the changes to our managed
      clusters while communicating with our customers about upcoming changes and
      maintenance windows.

      For 3 months in 2021, I lead an initiative to improve alert fatigue for
      our on-call engineers, by analyzing the pains they were experiencing and
      then applying a consistent labeling strategy on the alerts, as well as
      filtering unwanted alerts in Alertmanager and Prometheus.

    highlights:
      - Tech Lead for managed Kubernetes offering
      - Upstream contributions to Cluster API Provider OpenStack

  - name: narando GmbH
    position: Lead Developer
    website: https://about.narando.com/
    startDate: "2017-07"
    endDate: "2021-02"
    keywords:
      - AWS
      - Node.js
      - Gitlab CI
      - Terraform
      - Nest.js
      - Typescript
    summary: |
      narando provides a crowd-working platform where texts such as magazine
      articles and blog posts are recorded by professional narrators and
      subsequently published to websites and podcast platforms such as Spotify.
      It is a small company, so I wore many hats, often simultaneously, in the 5
      years I worked there.

      As the Lead Developer, I was responsible for the 3-person dev team. In
      that role, I planned the implementation of new features and oversaw our
      bi-weekly planning sessions. I introduced modern development practices
      such as merge requests and taught the other engineers to get them to excel
      at their tasks.

      In my role as a Backend Engineer, I planned and implemented a new version
      of the production and publishing platforms that power narando, as the
      previous proof of concept was hitting its limits. This new platform was
      built using multiple Node.js services for different use-cases such as core
      production, file handling, post-production, and publishing feeds.

      As the Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, I planned and implemented our
      infrastructure in AWS. Most of our services were deployed as containers to
      ECS and were backed by RDS MySQL. I also built an event queue for our
      services on top of SNS+SQS. Everything was configured by Terraform and by
      using common templates, new services could be launched in less than a day.

      To improve our development velocity and reduce toil, I build automated
      pipelines for our services to run tests and linting for each commit
      merge request and to automatically release and deploy the services once
      they are merged. During the first year we got started with Jenkins but
      then switched to GitLab CI because Jenkins needed too much maintenance and
      we liked the Gitlab CI syntax better.

    highlights:
      - Built out the infrastructure on AWS using mostly container technology (ECS)
      - Planned and implemented a Node.js microservice architecture
      - Introduced code reviews to improve the code quality and learn from each other

  - name: TrackCode GmbH
    position: Software Engineer Infrastructure & Backend
    website: https://trackcode.de/
    startDate: "2016-12"
    endDate: "2020-04"
    keywords:
      - Kubernetes
      - Backend
      - CI/CD
      - Node.js
      - Jenkins
    summary: |
      TrackCode is a Transport Management System for the last-mile delivery
      logistics companies, importing shipment data directly from the customers'
      systems and exporting scan events and signatures back to the logistics
      networks.

      When I joined TrackCode, I initially focused on the Node.js backend
      software, which was talking to the Web and Android Apps through a JSON
      API and persisting data in MySQL and MongoDB.

      Later on, my role at TrackCode shifted and I started working more on
      infrastructure and DevOps topics. I planned and implemented a new
      development platform for our growing team on top of Kubernetes with
      Rancher. To sustainably learn from past issues and avoid being waken up by
      alerts, I established a postmortem culture, which helped us fully
      explore incidents and solve the root causes.

      To improve our confidence and velocity during development and deployment,
      I implemented the full CI/CD lifecycle for all of our services, using
      Jenkins, Unit Tests, and finally an automated release to Kubernetes.

      To help us debug any incidents and investigate for customer support
      tickets, we used Splunk, but this proved to be too expensive in the long
      run. I developed our alternative monitoring and observability stack using
      Graylog, Grafana, and Prometheus. Using these, I also established SLOs for
      one of our core metrics, "time to export events".

    highlights:
      - Planned and implemented a new development platform on top of Kubernetes
      - Established a structured process to analyze incidents (postmortems)
      - Implemented a full CI/CD lifecycle for all services (Jenkins, Tests, Release to Kubernetes)

  - name: narando GmbH
    position: Working student
    website: https://about.narando.com/
    startDate: "2016-04"
    endDate: "2017-06"
    keywords:
      - Ruby on Rails
      - Android
    summary: |-
      While finishing my Abitur I started working at narando and started
      maintaining the initial proof of concept that was built using Rails.
      I was also responsible for our Android app and added offline support to it.

languages:
  - language: German
    fluency: Native speaker
  - language: English
    fluency: Fluent (C2)

interests:
  - name: Video Games
    keywords:
      - RPG
      - Strategy
  - name: Pen & Paper RPGs
    keywords:
      - Fantasy
      - DnD 5e
  - name: Music
    keywords:
      - Rock
      - Metal
      - Techno
      - Festivals & Concerts

references: []

education:
  - institution: Paderborn University
    studyType: Computer Science
    startDate: "2016-10"
    endDate: "2016-11"
    summary: |
      As a child and teenager, I always knew that I wanted to study Computer
      Science. But once I started my studies, I realized that the actual
      real-life work as a software engineer was far more interesting to me. I 
      dropped out after one month and instead started working at a second
      startup.

  - institution: Ev. Gymnasium Werther
    studyType: Abitur
    startDate: "2008"
    endDate: "2016-07-01"
    gpa: "2.2"
    courses:
      - LK Mathematik
      - LK Physik

projects:
  - name: Listory
    summary: |
      Self-hosted app to track all your Spotify listens and show interesting
      insights that I develop to fill my own needs.
    startDate: 2020-01
    url: https://github.com/apricote/Listory
    type: application
    keywords:
      - Node.js
      - Nest.js
      - Helm
      - React

  - name: Streaming on Twitch
    summary: |
      When I still have creative energy left at the end of the week, I like to
      stream software development on Twitch. I mostly stream my work on Listory,
      but in December 2021 I streamed my Advent of Code attempts every day.
    startDate: 2020-10
    url: https://twitch.tv/apricote4
    type: presentation
    keywords:
      - Go
      - Node.js
      - AV production
      - Public Talking

  - name: cluster-api-provider-openstack
    summary: |
      I am a reviewer of the project and actively contribute new features.
    startDate: 2022-03
    endDate: 2022-09
    url: https://sigs.k8s.io/cluster-api-provider-openstack
    type: application
    keywords:
      - Cluster API
      - OpenStack
      - Go
      - Kubernetes

  - name: "@narando/nest-xray"
    summary: |
      A package that integrates AWS X-Ray tracing with the Nest.js framework.
      Initially developed by me while I was working at narando.
    startDate: 2019-10
    endDate: 2020-10
    url: https://github.com/narando/nest-xray
    keywords:
      - Node.js
      - Nest.js
      - Tracing
      - AWS

  - name: hcloud-csi-driver
    summary: |
      Kubernetes CSI Driver to integrate with Hetzner Cloud Volumes.
      Based on the DigitalOcean CSI driver. Archived since Hetzner Cloud
      released an official driver.
    startDate: 2018-10
    endDate: 2019-09
    url: https://github.com/apricote/hcloud-csi-driver
    type: application
    keywords:
      - Go
      - Kubernetes

volunteer: []
awards: []
publications:
  - name: Various Presentations
    website: https://apricote.github.io/presentations/
    summary: |
      Multiple presentations at local meetups from 2017 to 2019.

      Topics included: Kubebuilder, CI/CD practices at my employer,
      JavaScript/Node.js patterns and practices