Jordan Cole

Portland, OR USA

Elsewhere

Hobby projects

I have over a decade of experience working at enterprise-focused startups. I’ve worked on everything from cross-browser bugs to building major features to tracking down poorly-written SQL to managing bare-metal servers.

I believe in collaboration and a positive work environment that forgives mistakes. I value clear communication, reproducible work, and automation that ensures quality.

I’m entirely self-taught, picking up new skills as required. I’ve learned about topics like internationalization, accessibility and ARIA, time zones and ISO 8601, E.164 and NANP, and how emoji are implemented in Unicode. I’ve also written tons of Ruby and JavaScript, a bit less shell scripting and TypeScript, and some PHP and SQL.

Opal (again)

Senior Software Engineer— 

ExaVault

Site Reliability Engineer — 

My biggest accomplishment was building a system to aggregate logs from 15–20 production servers (a mix of application, database, and storage) into a single searchable tool. I determined our requirements, evaluated commercial offerings, and recommended self-hosting the Elastic stack. I wrote a Chef cookbook that set up a secure, replicated system to extract structured data and provided sample visualizations. I later extended the system with Elastic’s SIEM tools and wrote a log-retention policy in preparation for SOC-2 certification, with automated alerts for suspicious activity.

Other notable work:

Opal

I was the first employee at the company, and over time I contributed to every level of the technology stack. The leadership respected that I didn’t want to become a manager, and instead I was trusted to work on problems that other teams didn’t have time to address. Beginning in 2016 I set up several hours of appointment slots every day to pair with anyone who needed help.

Site Reliability Engineer — 

I convinced my managers to let me create this role based on what I’d learned from Google’s SRE book. I collaborated closely with the Platform Operations team, but my projects were largely self-directed.

My biggest achievement was a report that examined the entire platform, from JavaScript error rates to AWS costs. I found we could save > 25% of annual hosting expenses, and identified high-value opportunities to improve application performance.

Other stuff I accomplished:

Full stack developer — 

This is when I developed a lot of the skills and knowledge I used in the SRE role. I helped build, maintain, and refactor large portions of the application.

Tools and technology I’ve worked with