Sean Collins

Sean Collins

Site Reliability Engineer

Contact Me

About Me

I'm a backend software engineer, specializing in building reliable infrastructure. I build consistent, scalable distributed systems which treat failure as inevitable and are designed to fail gracefully.

I'm an advocate for reducing human hours via automation whenever possible, and treating them as valuable when they can't be eliminated entirely. Issues which can be anticipated and remediated by software shouldn't bother engineers, and issues which can't should provide enough context such that engineers can resolve them quickly.

Besides software automation, my other areas of expertise are in database systems, computer networking, and cloud computing. Outside of computing, I enjoy long-distance running, extensive travel logistics, and discussing personal finance.

Projects

mysqltool

mysqltool

mysqltool consolidated operational workflows into a single codebase, which ran these flows as automated runbooks. Time to complete one common workflow, preparing a host for use, was reduced from an average of 40 minutes to 15 minutes to complete.

Project design

mysqlmon

mysqlmon

mysqlmon was a distributed agent which enabled hosts to monitor, alert, and expose live metrics of themselves on a strictly enforced minute cadence. Release in the agent resulted in a major paradigm shift in the team, enabling full operational onboarding of new engineers within one month and reducing operational overhead within the team to the extent that others could begin building infrastructure of their own.

Project design

Production CI/CD overhaul

Production CI/CD overhaul (Toontown)

Worked with a small team to rewrite a previously manual deployment system, such that we are now able to publish client and server game updates via code merge and a few clicks. We used GitLab CI as our CI platform to publish client patches and containerize server updates, and declared our Kubernetes infrastructure (ingresses, services, policies, etc.) in a Helm chart.

Project design

Hosted project

Toontown Rewritten

Toontown Rewritten

Toontown Rewritten is a volunteer-run massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), with over 1.7 million registered players.

Hosted project

Arsteakskan

Arsteakskan

A constructed auxiliary language for bilingual Chinese/English speakers, based upon the transliteration system Zhuyin Fuhao (aka Bopomofo).

Project on GitHub

Subnetcalc

Subnet Calculator

An online IP subnet calculator which allows you to visualize subnet division by host or by network.

Hosted project

Netmon

Network Monitor

I was the backend engineer for a small, deployed network monitoring application with alerting functionality.

Hosted project (closed source)

Niu32

Niu32 - 32-bit ISA and assembler

Niu32 is a specification for a simple 32-bit instruction set architecture that is simple to implement on hardware. It is byte- and word-addressable, and includes an assembler written in Python 3 that outputs machine code in Altera MIF format, ready to be loaded into instruction memory.

Project on GitHub

RAT

Reliable-As-TCP (RAT) - Reliable UDP extension

RAT is a specification of transport-layer extension to UDP that adds some of the reliability of TCP, including session establishment and reliable transmission, without all of the overhead of a full TCP header and processing.

Project on GitHub

16-bit Logisim processor

16-bit processor and ISA

A series of logic circuits built in the simulation software Logisim which simulates a 16-bit processor, able to load and execute assembled hex code from its own defined instruction set.

Video demonstration

Project on GitHub