Hi, I am Alex

Recent Posts

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Managed by Robots

At work my day job has typically been a Product Team individual contributor. However, building developer tools and automation within our organization has always been a side project of mine. Seeing time be wasted repeatedly on a manual task that could be automated just gets under my skin and forces me to do something to scratch that itch. This post continues down the path set forward by my previous post describing this site.

October 29, 2020 Read
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Reborn in Hugo

It’s been a while since I did much blogging and worked on this site. However, this fall I got a bit of inspiration, so I figured I’d blow off the dust and try it again. For me, writing takes real effort. I have to turn off other distractions and focus. Instead, like usual when I work on my site, I procrastinate it a bit by working on the underlying technical aspects, less on the content.

October 23, 2020 Read
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Rails Environment VS Deploy Environment

When the same verbiage is used in multiple contexts, it can be uber confusing for new people. On my team, I recall over the years that the majority of people getting started with us get caught up briefly on the difference between the Rails Environments concept, vs our concept of deploying to multiple environments (like dev, staging, prod, etc). For people brand new to the industry, the idea of multiple deployment environments may be the new part.

May 9, 2019 Read

Alex Bezek

Associate Lead Software Engineer at Cerner

I’ve been working at Cerner as a Software Engineer since I graduated in 2014. Through that time I have worked on all levels of the stack such as Frontend React Applications, Backend domain driven Ruby Microservices, and Automated Containerized Deployments. I’ve worked as a Team Lead, a Technical Product Owner, and now operate as a Individual Contributor implementing key projects, and being a technical lead for multiple teams.

Leadership
Team Work
Communication
Hard Working
Fast Learner
Problem Solving

Experiences

1
Cerner

May 2013 - Present, Kansas City, Missouri

Software Engineer on Consumer Facing Applications and Services

Associate Lead Software Engineer

September 2019 - Present

  • Shifted to be an individual contributor and technical leader moving freely to where I can provide the most value.
  • Worked on key projects our team didn’t have expertise in such as designing and creating infrastructure for client owned Vanity domains for our applications.
  • Designed and implemented public facing APIs across multiple product teams.
  • Pioneered migrating large workloads from on-prem to AWS defining infrastructure and utilizing Amazon services like Route53, Cloudfront, ALB, Lambda, and IAM.
Team Lead | Senior Software Engineer

March 2017 - September 2019

  • Became a Team Lead with 5 direct reports and also operated as the Technical Product owner for our Full Stack Application and Microservices of our product.
  • Designed and helped implement our team’s React and Redux on Rails Application and Microservices for Consumer Wellbeing Educational content.
  • Created our first fully automated Spinnaker Pipelines for building, testing, and deploying our Org’s Rails components that was adopted and used by hundreds of components.
Assoociate Software Engineer

September 2016 - March 2017

  • As an Associate Software Engineer I took on new technical projects with little background to pave the road for the rest of the team to be effective.
  • Identified a risk in that we only had 1 other front end engineer, so I volunteered to learn React and helped the team onboard to start using it for all frontend work.
  • Joined a Skunkworks team on the side to POC migrating our Rails Applications and Services to use automated Dockerized deployments.
Software Engineer

June 2014 - September 2016

  • Started working on a .Net Wellness web application where I focused on re-writing the UI to be 508 compliant.
  • In my free time, I implemented process improvements like setting up the team’s first automated jenkins build, and evangelized using standard branching practices with SVN.
  • Was selected to pioneer moving our solution to React on Rails. I became our team’s knowledge expert on Rails as well as learning the Population Health’s Rails ecosystem for authentication, deployments, and microservices.
Software Engineer Intern

May 2013 - August 2013

  • Worked on the Incident Response Center team which runs alerting and dashboards for early alerting clients of issues with their system.
  • Utilized Powershell to crawl internal device IPs searching for printer devices with errors pushing alerts to a Mongo database.
  • Learned the Agile process partipating in Scrum, Planning, and code reviews with the team.
Sofware Engineer Intern
Advise Technologies

May 2012 - December 2013, Manhattan, Kansas

Advise Technologies creates software solutions for financial investors and advisors. I learned to work on a software system based around a field I had no knowledge of, but was able to adapt to the environment and find valuable solutions that benefited both our clients and employees.

Responsibilities:
  • My first real programming job! I learned fundamentals of working on a team, using source control, and contributing to a large code base.
  • Worked on an internal C# desktop application for analytics of potential hedge fund clients.
2

Skills

Ruby on Rails Development
Ruby on Rails Development

6 years of experience creating Ruby on Rails Applications, Microservices, and reusable infrastructure gems

Javascript Development
Javascript Development

5 years of modern client side javascript development integrated into Rails Applications with an emphasis on performance.

Go Development
Go Development

A new hobbyist Go developer. After using it at work to build a custom Terraform Provider for work, I now use it for small projects and focus on learning more in my free time.

React
React

Created an Atomic Design based component library for product teams to use. Used React + Redux to create rich interactive web applications.

Microservices
Microservices

Worked on a large SOA system designing and implementing services and defining org standards around orchestration, distributed tracing, caching, and monitoring.

AWS
AWS

Migrated large scale live workloads to AWS with no downtime. Defined standards around IAM profiles, application and service infrastructure, and used services like Elasticache, WAF, and Lambda to enhance AWS workloads.

Docker
Docker

Became obsessed with Docker after volunteering to learn chef for our deployments. Lead our teams in the process to move from Chef VM deployments to using Docker on DC/OS.

Terraform
Terraform

Utilized Terraform for provisioning AWS infrastructure and New Relic alerts. Created our own internal Terraform Provider for managing configuration across our services.

Spinnaker
Spinnaker

Created multiple reusable spinnaker pipelines to fully automate deploying containers and AWS infrastructure across multiple Global clouds each with multiple internal AZ’s.

Achievements

Dev Culture

Awards

Speaking

Mentorship