About Ned
Pursuing Excellence
My passion spans diverse experiences, from the discipline of skiing to the precision of engineering.
- Knowledge Transfer
- Documentation and testing are second-nature to me, and I much prefer tooling that is readable and easy to teach. Infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, and fast CI/CD are essential building blocks.
- High Impact
- High-impact work is my driving force. Helping teams and individuals grow is a big part of that. Good infrastructure is invisible, but that doesn't reduce the joy I get from crafting it.
- Thoughtful Solutions
- A champion for security, performance, and scalability, non-functional requirements are my bread and butter. Simplicity and observability are keys to low-stress operations. Legacy isn't a bad word - it's the sign of a successful product.
- Remote Native
- Committed to fast responses and frequent updates, I find joy and humor in navigating the challenges along the way.
Ned has been consulting at New Moon Labs since 2017 and has been building internet infrastructure since 1994. Ned's entire career has been focused on IT consulting and software development.
Prior to New Moon Labs, Ned co-founded SmallAxe, a log and event management sevice, and AppliedTrust, a provider of IT security and network/systems infrastructure consulting services that was acquired in 2015. He is also a founder of Blockbase, Backup Bunny, GoodMeat, and EverPet.
Ned holds a CS degree from Cornell University’s College of Engineering and was a member of the Cornell Network Research Group.
An accomplished speaker and author, Ned contributed to the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook and regularly speaks at conferences. He has also made significant contributions to his community, serving as Board Chair for the Boulder Valley Humane Society, lecturing at CU Boulder's CS department, and founding the Telluride TechFest.
- Clients served
- 120+
- Industry experience
- 29 years
- Typical engagement
- 6-12 weeks
- Mountain time
- UTC-7
Technology Stack
I believe in using the right tools for the job. These are some of my current favorties:
- Infrastructure
- Cloud Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, CloudFlare, Azure, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, OVH, cost management strategies.
Virtualization and Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, GKE, EKS, Nomad, VMWare, Xen, Firecracker.
Infrastructure as Code: Kubernetes (YAML, Helm), GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux), Terraform, Crossplane, Ansible, Pulumi, Packer, Bash, PowerShell.
Operating Systems: Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL, Amazon Linux, Alpine), MacOS, Windows, Raspberry Pi, Arduino.
Serverless: AWS Lambda, CloudFlare workers, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, Fargate, Knative, Netlify, Vercel, event-driven architectures.
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana (custom plugins), VictoriaMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Honeycomb, CloudWatch, DataDog, New Relic, Splunk, ELK Stack, Loki.
Performance and Troubleshooting: Tcpdump, Wireshark, Sysdig, flamegraphs, deep knowledge of networking and Linux internals.
Networking: VPCs, VPNs, load balancing, firewalls, NAT, BGP routing, DNS, Tailscale, QoS, IPv6.
Kubernetes: LinkerD, Istio, Nginx ingress/egress, custom operators and sidecars, Ceph, CSIs/CNIs, certificate authorities. - Software Development
- Programming Languages: Go, JavaScript, Python. Previous use: Java, PHP, Objective C, R, Lua, C#.
Distributed Systems and API Design: REST, gRPC, protobufs, Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, CloudFlare Queues, NATS, etcd, Zookeeper.
Application Frameworks: Vue.js, React, Alpine.js, Nuxt.js, Next.js, JQuery, Flask, Django, Spring.
API Services: PostgREST, Hasura, Supabase, GraphQL, OpenAPI, Kong, Tyk, AWS API Gateway, Zapier.
Testing: Playwright, Selenium, JUnit, Nightwatch, Cypress, load and capacity testing.
Version Control and CI/CD: Github Actions, Dagger, GitLab, Jenkins, Drone CI, feature flags, Git, SBOM, branching/review/deploy practices.
CMS: Gatsby.js, Drupal, Wordpress, Notion, Hugo, Ghost, Decap.
Design: Tailwind, Bootstrap, Figma, Illustrator, Procreate, MonoDraw, pen and watercolor.
Productivity: Slack, Discord, Teams, JIRA, ServiceNow, Asana, Notion, VS Code, vim, heavy emphasis on the CLI. - Data and Security
- MLOps: Ray, MLFlow, Argo Workflows, Jupyter, RStudio, ETL, RAG pipelines, Slurm, PyTorch, TensorFlow, SageMaker, TorchServe, Darknet.
Transactional Databases: Postgres, Redis, SQLite, DynamoDB, Supabase, MySQL, MongoDB, Firebase.
Analytical/Specialty Databases: ClickHouse, RedShift, BigQuery, HDFS, Elastic, Neo4j, ArangoDB, Minio.
Identity: KeyCloak, Auth0, Cognito, Okta, Azure AD, Legacy Active Directory, OAuth2, SAML, SIMD, LDAP.
Secrets management: Hashicorp Vault, Sealed Secrets, AWS Secrets Manager, k8s secrets injection, Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud Secret Manager.
IT Operations/Security: Preparing and auditing SOC2, HIPAA, PCI , ISO 27001, and GDPR compliance. Aligning IT operations with industry standards and regulations.