About
In a world where technology feels like magic, I want to be a wizard.
Cloud Developer
- Email: info@aracarson.com
- City: Toronto, Canada
I have a unique blend of work experiences.
I started my working life bulding things. Building film sets, custom cabinetry, commercial displays; whatever work I could get my hands on.
Skip ahead a few years and I'm working in telecommunications and networking, building data analytics services in a cloud computing environment.
From cutting lumber to upgrading servers, it's still best practice to measure twice and cut once.
Ara Carson
Efficiency-driven and innovative Cloud Developer with 4+ years of experience designing and developing data analytics services.
info@aracarson.com
Toronto, Canada
Professional Experience
Cloud Developer
Apr 2023 - May 2024
Rogers Communications Inc.
- Database administration, data pipeline monitoring, customer report automation, service point-of-contact with Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)
- CI/CD for development of TTC Data Analytics products, journey analytics for passenger flow insights
- Conducted security audits and billing audits for cloud infrastructure and cloud engineering teams
- Managed continuous payment of services throughout business merger
Cloud Developer
June 2022 - Apr 2023
BAI Communications Inc.
- Design and build of real-time platform passenger activity data product for TTC, including map dashboard, REST API, email alerting
- Delivered real-time solution with 3 to 8 second delay between data collection and customer view (based on 5 sec polling interval)
- Developed an Internet of Things dashboard for a city council in the United Kingdom, collecting traffic and weather data from a LoRaWAN network
- Upgraded oxidized backup system for network hardware and testing backup restoration for operations team
Technology Specialist
June 2020 - June 2022
BAI Communications Inc.
- Development of proof-of-concept project for environmental monitoring in subway environment with PoE air quality sensors
- Research and development of remote ssh tunnel for IoT equipment management
- Reverse engineering network packet captures to query connected-vehicle telemetry data
- Creation of dashboards for marketing team advertising metrics, networking team syslogs and hardware metrics
- Migration of on-premises self-managed elasticsearch deployment to elastic cloud, including full port and validation of pipelines and visualizations.
- This work included separation of data between two teams into two separate elastic cloud deployments, with a version upgrade at the same time! I'm very proud of this project!
Administrative Assistant
October 2019 - June 2020
BAI Communications Inc.
- Compiling and documenting expense reports for executive team
- Arranging flights and accomodations for corporate travel and conferences
- Logistics for shipping confidential parcels and engineering equipment
- Audited resources in cloud accounts with feedback from data analytics team, giving insight into cloud technology billing and common cost optimizations
Technical Proficiencies
Amazon Web Services
- Serverless: Lambda, DynamoDB, Glue, Kinesis Analytics, Athena, SES
- Infrastructure: EC2, RDS (Aurora MySQL / PostgreSQL)
- Networking: VPC, Security Groups, Route 53, CloudTrail
- Credentials: Cognito, SAML Identity Federation, IAM
Elasticsearch
- On-Premises to Elastic Cloud migration, two major version upgrades
- Data lifecycle management, shard and index managment
- Alerting for network operations, machine learning anomaly detection
- Visualization expertise for transit and networking related KPIs
- Platinum tier account, annual credit provisioning
Education
Industrial Engineering
2017 - 2019
Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Design focused engineering program. I was interested in factory design, but I left the program after 2 years to start working at BAI.
Construction Trades Certificate Program
2015 - 2016
George Brown College, Toronto, ON, Canada
2 Month overview for each trade skill:
Millwrighting, Welding, Residential Electrical, Plumbing, Carpentry, Refrigeration, Sheet Metal (HVAC)
Main learning was how to efficiently work alongside other trades. How to make work smooth for everyone, not just my trade.
Facts
The last metric is the only interesting one here, but I like the one about Spain, as far as facts go.
Ongoing projects
I haven't given up on
Years of experience
generally speaking
More people have been to
Barcelona than I have!
Cost to run this site
per month in CAD, including domain registration
Skills
*Ask me more about how this score is calculated!
Services
How can my experience work for you?
Cloud Infrastructure and Billing Audit
Skilled at organizing cloud infrastructure, managing multi-account deployments, and asset cataloguing for cost optimizations.
Data Visualization
Skilled with SQL data visualization (Tableau and Quicksight) as well as NoSQL data visualization (Elasticsearch and Kibana) to easily integrate with table-based or document-based data structures.
Data Analytics Sales Consulting
4+ years experience developing cutting edge data analytics solutions for transit, giving insights into passenger-flow and passenger-activity.
Security Research
Perform tests to see how discoverable your network assets are, and deliver a report on what services need upgrading and any vulnerabilities relevant to your systems.
Ad-Hoc Data Analysis and Report Generation
After signing and NDA and getting access to a sample of your data, I discover, analyze, generate KPIs and identify anomalies, ending with a custom data analytics report.
Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Consulting
AWS managed services can be expensive, though some are worth the cost. I can consult with your team to identify areas where costs can be cut with low-effort changes.
Contact
Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.