About

Me in 10 Seconds

• Name: Alex Kraker
• Age: 41
• Occupation: Linux & Cloud Security Engineer
• Employer: I work @ Peraton
• Location: Tulsa, OK
• Dependents: 1 dog “Feather”, 1 cat “Thomas O’Malley” (aka “Tom”)

Me Professionally

The majority of my professional background in tech is as a Linux Sysadmin. Currently, my day-to-day is focused on Linux Security Engineering working on federal infrastructure as a government contractor. My bread-and-butter is Ansible for managing infrastructure on various platforms, mostly different flavors of Enterprise Linux and Windows Server. I’ve also worked with various “Infrastructure as Code” and CI/CD tools: Terraform, Packer, Ansible Automation Platform, GitLab CI… just to name a few that I’m relatively well-versed in.

My engineering mindset

I’m a whole-systems thinker and I truly enjoy the challenge of wrapping my head around large infrastructure systems and bringing order to complexity. I tend to work from first principles and my “MO” is to always try to build robust, repeatable, and fault-tolerant solutions that scale. It’s first-order problem solving and solving problems not just once but categorically for all (or at least “most”) cases. Modularity, code-reuse, well-architected design patterns, and idempotency. Automate away the toil, and build and share useful tools other engineers use.