My Resume

Jimmy Brancaccio

Contact Information

Phone: 802-715-1473
Location: Cypress, TX
Website: jimmyb.ninja
Email: hi[ @ ]jimmyb.ninja

Experience

Gitpod - May, 2022 - January, 2023

Technical Support Engineer
As the first Technical Support Engineer at Gitpod I performed duties commonly associated with this position such as assisting our customers in using our product and troubleshooting any issues they had when using it. I was also heavily involved in building out the fundamentals of the technical support team structure. This included but wasn't limited to deploying test environments that could be used when troubleshooting customer issues, writing the Technical Support Handbook which contained policies, prodecures and best practices for all Technical Support Engineers to follow and use as guidance during their day to day work, testing and documenting multiple support ticket systems to ensure we were using the one that best met our needs while also ensuring that we were getting the best deal. I was also involved in creating and tracking quarterly goals for the Technical Support team and I took the opportunity to mentor the second member of the Technical Support team. I was kindly afforded the time to further my education and knowledge on Kubernetes, Docker, Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, Terraform, and other related technologies.

cPanel, LLC - July, 2016 to May, 2022

  • Technical Coordinator - Siteocity (February 2018 - May, 2022) - In conjunction with developing tools and applications for the cPanel Technical Support Department I also managed a web hosting company that was purchased. This web hosting company, Siteocity, was to be a place where we could test edge versions of our software in a real live environment. In this position I managed our servers, which included providing a reasonable level of uptime, security, and performance to all systems, managed our WHMCS instance which included billing, domain names, signups, and the built-in ticket system. I oversaw the outsourced technical support team insuring they provided first class technical support to our customers. I would handle any tickets that were escalated, this included both technical support and billing/sales tickets. I would also make ongoing recommendations for the continuous improvement of Siteocity and how we could better engage our customers to solicit their feedback of cPanel & WHM. As Siteocity was our place to run edge versions of the product in a live environment this also involved reporting any defects found or improvements that could be made in the product back to the development team (via JIRA). I also performed thorough reviews of third party software that we (cPanel) were interested in either integrating with or aquiring. This position also required me to be on call 24/7/365. I also built several tools so that our accounting department could easily access (via a web interface) specific information from our WHMCS instance.
  • Technical Support Application Developer (February 2018 - May, 2022) - Continued development of a web based dashboard that facilitated a structured and easy to follow paths when managing daily tasks as a Technical Analyst Support Supervisor or Technical Analyst Team Lead. This included building out components or modules if you may within this dashboard that handled major and minor tasks that were once previously handled in a very manual fashion. Major components include:
    • ta@ Reports: This component allows Supervisors and Team Leads to log reports for an employee via a web interface or by sending in an email. These reports could be categorized and allowed for comments to be left on them by Supervisors and Team Leads. Supervisors and Team Leads can also review them when it came time to putting together performance evaluations.
    • Make Recommendation Reports: These are generated from our support ticket system (ZenDesk) usually by other Technical Support Analysts. They are used to help Supervisors and Team Leads make recommendations to the employee on how to improve their performance or to point out misinformation or a mistake made by an employee. Supervisors and Team Leads review the reports and can use them as opportunities to coach, educate and/or counsel the reported employee. Similar to the above, these reports also help build a picture of how the employee has done in the previous six months when putting together a performance evaluation.
    • Low Feedback Score Reports: These reports were automatically generated when a script checks our feedback database and an employee has received a "thumbs-down" or neutral feedback score. Supervisors and Team Leads would review these reports and determine if the feedback was warranted or not. They would reach out to the customer to determine if they would like to have the feedback removed or if they would like to have the feedback re-evaluated. They would also reach out to the employee if there was an opportunity to (re-)educate or coach them to help them improve their handling of a similar issue in the future.
    • Employee Profiles: These profiles were both Supervisor/Team Lead facing as well as employee facing. Lots of different data was provided on these profile pages including but not limited to work schedules, the ability to have notes, showing daily ticket stats such as total unique tickets handled, total ticket responses, average feedback scores, a percentage of tickets that had received feedback out of a total of unique tickets handled year to date, a basic graph breaking down their average feedback score month to month, an employees last 100 handled tickets, recent ticket feedback, a breakdown of their JIRA cases submitted (bugs, docs, improvements, etc...), tickets that an employee handled that were above their level (ex. if the employee was a L1, it would show L2 tickets the employee handled), make recommendation reports an employee had received and sent, and ta@ reports for the employee.
    • There are many other smaller components which made up this dashboard, I would be happy to discuss them if there is interest.

    As part of this position I also created and managed several other dashboards. These dashboards were more of a read-only type as they only provided information. There were dashboards for each shift of the Technical Support Analyst department. They would show a listing of each employee of the shift with their average feedback scores, how many JIRA cases had been logged, how many tickets the shift had handled, an average feedback score of the shift as a whole, and feedback comments that customers had left for employees on the shift. Other dashboards were built for the migrations and customer service teams which displayed the same information as the aforementioned shift dashboards. I also built another dashboard for our migrations team which displayed the amount of completed migrated year by year and month to month.

    I also setup and managed an instance of Grafana which I connected to multiple internal databases. I built several dashboards in Grafana to take advantage of the data provided by these internal databases. This data mostly consisted of data regarding ticket feedback, incoming ticket counts, counts of Technical Support Analysts clocked in, and how many were working on tickets. Other graphs included the amount of tickets submitted during various release cycles and product versions, and graphs depicting how many tickets were incoming by the hour.
  • Technical Analyst Supervisor (July 2016 - February 2018) - I supervised a team of Level I, II and III technical support analysts. As a Supervisor I would promote attendance and punctuality, boost employee morale, and collaborate on setting effective department procedures. Objectives of this position also included the development of team members ensuring they had every opportunity to reach their fullest potential, including but not limited to counseling and coaching employees. I provided employees of my shift performance evaluations twice yearly along with monthly one on one meetings. These one on one meetings were opportunities to address improvements, highlight successes and even to get to know about the employees lives outside of work. Other tasks as a supervisor included managing employee timeclocks, shift scheduling, and time off requests, promoting effective daily shift handoff meetings, contributing feedback on departmental procedures and how they could be improved. I also had a hand in part of the hiring process for potentially new technical support analysts by conducting phone interviews as the first step in their interview process. As a Supervisor it also involved working with upset customers, to listen to them, and work with them towards a satifactory solution that they were happy with. During my time as a Technical Analyst Supervisor I started to build a dashboard which helped me perform my daily tasks. This lead me to my next position within the company after sharing it with the Director of Technical Support and my fellow Technical Support Analyst Supervisors.
WHMCS Ltd. - March, 2015 to July, 2016

Assistant Support Manager of WHMCS Technical Support & Customer Service
I work in conjunction with our Technical Support Manager to supervisor and support our Technical Support and Customer Service Teams. Duties include managing scheduling, time off requests, handling escalated tickets, working with members from each team when they request help or guidance on support tickets, review and optimization of policies and procedures, handling payroll and ensuring feedback bonuses are paid out as a part of payroll, ensuring vendor accounts have positive balances, development of a support tool which improves the ease of troubleshooting for our technical support team, hiring of new employees and performing their on-boarding and training, handling the review of support tickets to ensure there are no clear-text passwords left in them, working with our development team to ensure the visibility of high priority cases, etc...

cPanel, LLC - August, 2014 - March, 2015

Technical Analyst II
As a Level II Technical Analyst I handled tickets escalated by Level I Analysts as well as I would work on tickets from our Enterprise customers. In addition to working with customers I also mentored and worked with our Level I Analysts to teach and share knowledge with them so they could further their careers. I later learned this position was to get me in door at the company and once I was settled in to then move into a supervisory/mangerial position.

HostGator.com LLC. - August, 2009 to August, 2014

  • Linux Systems Administrator II / HostGator International Team (August, 2012 - August, 2014) - Continuing work as a Level II Systems Administrator while traveling abroad to assist in setting up new international branches of the company. Providing Linux Systems Administrator training to new international employees. Continuing training and support of international agents locally and remotely. Managed deployments of shared hosting environments and Virtuozzo-based host nodes for the international branches. Handling most supervisor duties including QA, shift scheduling and management of international Linux Administrators.
  • Linux Systems Administrator II & Supervisor (April, 2012 - August, 2012) - Providing level 2 systems support to customers. Handling escalated tickets from the level 1 system administrators. Developing small scripts to assist with commonly performed tasks. Installing custom software for customers, handling farm-wide issues, doing more proactive tasks, handing dedicated server reloads. Supervisor issues remain the same.
  • Linux Systems Recruiter & Supervisor (March, 2011 - April, 2012) - I work with a team of about 5 people. Our goal is to find the best candidates for our company as Linux Server Administrators (Levels I-III). Tasks include maintaining a virtual test environment to gauge and test possible new employees, handling over the phone and in-person interviews with possible candidates, scheduling and re-scheduling if necessary interview dates and times. Duties also included, as necessary, those listed below as well.
  • Linux Server Administrative Supervisor (August, 2010 - March, 2011) - Watching over a night shift of Linux Support administrators (10-15 employees at any given time). Working on issues that administrators were unable to solve or understand. I worked with them so they could learn and better understand the given issue. As I supervisor I also worked on handling escalated issues from distraught/upset customers via support tickets or phone, managing employee attendance records, work schedules and time off requests, handling employee disciplinary actions and performance plans, working one-on-one with employees as to resolve support issues, making sure support issues in multiple queues are being handled appropriately and in a timely manner, making sure each night shift is properly staffed to handle incoming support requests.
  • Linux Server Administrator (August, 2009 - August, 2010) - The main tasks include assisting customers via email support tickets and helping ensure stability and uptime on 5,000+ Linux servers. Support requests range in tasks from DNS record updates, troubleshooting common web software like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, OSCommerce and other various PHP scripts to reviewing MySQL service performance, reviewing log files, locating iframe/Javascript injections, importing and exporting MySQL databases, reviewing mod_security issues, light PHP coding, writing BASH for loops to help automate large tasks, understanding strace output, working within cPanel and WHM, assisting customers with optimizations for their websites, troubleshooting email issues (Exim mainly), upgrading Apache and PHP software, iptables configuration, transferring accounts between servers. I was specifically put in charge of handling our Restores and Reboots queues while on shift. This involved making sure customers requesting restores from our in-house NAS servers were done in a timely fashion. Reboots involved watching a high priority queue which customers submit reboot requests to and rebooting their dedicated servers as necessary to meet SLA. I was also awarded Employee of the Month during August 2010.

University of Vermont - August, 2008 to August, 2009

Technology Support Specialist
Help desk support using a ticket based support system, hardware troubleshooting, configuration, maintenance, and support of a FileMaker server, administration of a web server, mobile device support, proper backup and imaging of desktop and portable computers, research and development on web applications, maintenance of 30+ project websites, PHP scripting for web forms, HTML newsletter code development, inventory of computer hardware and software, documentation of practices and procedures, Moodle installation, configuration and maintenance, integration of PHPBB3, Joomla and Moodle softwares for single-sign-on.

Macintosh-Admin & VTMacIT - July, 2007 to August, 2008

Apple Consultant
Consulting for residential clients, as well as small and medium businesses, maintenance of small sized networks with 20-30 clients, developing secure and reliable backup plans for clients, network design and proper equipment implementation for various networks types, hardware repairs of Apple desktops, servers and laptops.

Small Dog Electronics - October, 2004 to March, 2008

  • Apple Specialist Consultant (January, 2008 - March, 2008) - Sales agent in retail store, customer service, simple diagnosis and repair of iPods, Apple laptops and desktops, network design and implementation for residential clients, as well as medium and large businesses, and Apple enterprise solutions (Xserve, Xserve RAID, XSAN) within Windows & Macintosh networks.
  • Web Content Specialist (November, 2006 - January, 2008) - Maintaining web site (SmallDog.com) and content within website, ad and graphic design, maintaining newsletter lists, keeping up to date with all current Apple software and hardware, writing articles for multiple newsletters and blogs, coding portions of the Small Dog website, optimizing already existing web code, maintaining an accurate description for each product on the website, working with in-house marketing staff and PCWorld.com to generate best click-through rates on web banners, providing e-mail based support for Apple and 3rd party products to clients, keeping records of all current and past ads, pushing out content to the newly re-designed SmallDog.com website.
  • Retail sales and computer technician (October, 2004 - November, 2006) - Retail sales, consulting for small businesses and residential clients, building wireless and wired Ethernet networks, Apple computer repairs, obtaining Apple Product Professional status through Apple, shipping and receiving in warehouse, setting up file sharing networks, setting up secure remote access to company servers, building OS X Panther and Tiger based servers, providing e-mail based support for Apple products, writing for a weekly newsletter and company blog.

Skills

LAMP/LEMP stack installation, configuration and maintenance in Linux environments
Docker, Docker Compose
Kubernetes, Helm
Proxy software setup and configuration (Apache, Nginx, Traefik)
Web Development in HTML, CSS, Javascript
Web Application development in PHP (Laravel) & MySQL
Strong familiarity in macOS, Linux and Windows desktop operating system environments
Strong familiarity in macOS and Linux server operating system environments
Cisco Networking Solutions (CCNA-level) - configuration of routers, switches and VLANs
cPanel & WHM
Exim - setup and configuration
Dovecot - setup and configuration
BIND - setup and configuration
PowerDNS - setup and configuration
Using iptables to secure Linux systems
Basic Perl scripting
Basic Bash scripting including awk, sed, for and while loops
Writing technical documentation and guides

Projects

MyVideoGameList - April, 2011 to Present

myvideogamelist.com

MyVideoGameList.com is a website which allows users to track and keep a list of the video games they're currently playing or have played amongst other statuses. It was originally written for personal use but it appears other people have found a good use for it as well. The site is built from the ground up using PHP & MySQL. It features an integration of bbPress forum software as well as CometChat. The site is an on-going work in progress, and there's still a fair amount of features and code that I'd like to get implemented.

Macintosh-Admin - November, 2007 to August, 2009

macintosh-admin.com

This is a project I started with one of my best friends while working at Small Dog Electronics. We wanted it to be a repository of knowledge including, tutorials, news, and code that we created or from others that we found useful while working with Mac OS X Server and the Apple Xserve. Since the Apple Xserve and Xserve RAID have been discontinued the site is mostly in-active. It was originally built using WordPress and integrated with bbPress. Since then the site has been moved to Octopress and no longer uses a forum.

My Blog - March, 2013 to Present

jimmyb.ninja

After going through various types of blogging software I decided most were too bloated for what I needed so I ended up developing my own. The first iteration was built from scratch using HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and Disqus which handled comments on articles. The next major and current implementation utilized the Laravel PHP framework. I find that I am always working to improve its code, layout, and functionality.

MyAnimeList - January, 2014 to January, 2020
This web application was very similar to MyVideoGameList but was specifically made for anime. It allowed me to create a list of anime and set them to one of several statuses. It also acted as a database for hundreds if not thousands of anime titles. I built this application because the current solution at MyAnimeList.net was failing me (and others) as it was unstable and unreliable. I also prefer to store my data on my own servers. I stopped working on this and have implemented much of its functionality into my own blog.

Scribbld - July, 2007 to Present

scribbld.com

Scribbld is one of my larger projects in terms of the amount of users. It utilizes the LiveJournal source code as it's platform. Scribbld originally ran on 3 web servers and 2 database servers, however after optimizing the site, and code and upgrading physical resources I've been able to get the site to run without issue on a single physical server. Scribbld has over 100,000 users. I am responsible for daily server maintenance & backup of important data, keeping server reliability & stability high, supporting end users when issues arise, general maintenance involved in a community-based website, and maintaining multiple web servers and database servers in a secure manner. I also developed external scripts to handle paid account notifications and statuses as well as a script which allowed users to purchased purged/deleted accounts. Currently Scribbld isn't receiving any active development time, due to new projects utilizing all my development time as well as a lack of support from the LiveJournal development community.

Confessh.us - June, 2009 to November, 2011

This idea of this project originated from a friend and within a few weeks we had a working version of the site up and running. The idea behind Confessh.us was that anyone could submit a confession (anonymously if they wanted) and could read and comment on confessions left by other users. The site was built using PHP & MySQL and we integrated it with bbPress for discussions. The site is no longer active and the code has been archived, mostly as reference for future projects.

Movie Rental Web Application - May, 2009 to May, 2015

I built this application for a local general store that wanted to rent movies out to their customers. The application allowed users to store customer information, an inventory of their movies, as well as functionality that allowed customers to rent out movies. The applications also generated statistics such as whom has rented the most movies, which movies were late, late fees, and the total number of movies and customers in the database. The application has gone through several iterations, mostly UI changes. The final version used Bootstrap as its CSS framework. While the application was specifically designed for a single store, it's more than possible the application could be used by multiple places, each with their own database of movies and customers.