Marshall Ford — DevOps Engineer & Full Stack Web Developer

About Me
Marshall Ford

About Me

I am a DevOps Engineer & Full Stack Web Developer from the snowy state of Minnesota. I have a wide array of interests in technology thanks to an appetite for learning and a hearty portion of curiosity (see what I did there?).

DevOps

Within the sphere of operations and site reliability I am passionate about:

  1. Adopting container orchestration as a secure and scalable landing zone for workloads
  2. Building versatile developer-first platforms
  3. Innovating with public cloud offerings
  4. Embracing GitOps and Infrastructure as Code principles to describe and manage systems
  5. Utilizing CI/CD tooling for transparent, predictable, and reliable builds

Software Engineering

In the web development space I am passionate about:

  1. Developing intuitive and pragmatic front-ends
  2. Implementing performant and secure back-ends, APIs, and services
  3. Harnessing mature open source platforms for caching and persistence

Other Interests

  • Home automation and self-hosting
  • Contributing to open source
  • Watches (and finding bargains)
  • Hip-Hop
  • Coffee and cocktails, enjoyed separately and responsibly of course

Get in Touch

Have a question for me? Looking for my resume? Shoot me an email. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Curated Projects

Self-Managed Kubernetes

homelab

A GitOps controlled Kubernetes cluster for workloads such as Home Assistant (home automation), Keycloak (self-hosted identity provider), Prometheus + Grafana (monitoring), and the UniFi controller (network mgmt). The cluster was “assembled” with k3s (a lightweight distribution of k8s), Calico for network, and CRI-O as the container runtime. Istio’s service mesh in tandem with MetalLB provides ingress to the cluster.

K8s Mutating Webhook for Defaulting AllowPrivilegeEscalation

source

Written in Go and published as a container image. GitHub Actions is used for CI/CD. Project includes tests, documentation, and a full featured Makefile for transparent builds/releases. Supports multiple installation methods.

Home Infrastructure

homelab

Routing and firewall functions via pfSense, virtualization platform via Proxmox VE, and storage/backup services provided by TrueNas. Currently a fairly standard setup, but I’m always on the lookout for what’s next.

Personal Website

source

This very website. Rendered with Hugo, a static site generator. Styling and UX via handcrafted SCSS with a bit of transpiled JS. Built as a container image and deployed with Terraform to GCP Cloud Run. GitHub Actions is used for CI/CD.

Speedtest container image

source

The Speedtest C++ CLI tool published as a container image. Cirrus CI is used for CI/CD. The structured JSON output could be passed to Prometheus via the Grok exporter as a useful metric for network health.

Reverse Geocoder

source

A RESTful web service for reverse geocoding. Supports fall-through providers, caching, multiple provider types, and more! Built with Node.js and Redis.