Branden Ragains

1. 2022-03 – present

   Louisville, KY

   In service

   Senior Infrastructure Architect

   Humana · Web Technologies Engineering

   Web Technologies Engineering manages the bulk of Humana's servicing load: several thousand deployments of our custom server images. I work across the full stack of those platforms, from design consultation and DR planning to capacity and incident management.

   • Developed and deployed a large MVC .NET API and GUI that is now standard on all servers at Humana.
   • Application migrations, tools simplification and refactoring, debugging and log tracing.
   • Security across the platforms: SSL, keystores and ciphers.

   Platforms

   IIS · WebLogic · WebSphere · Tomcat · JBoss

2. 2017-08 – 2022-03

   Louisville, KY area

   DevOps Systems Engineer

   3DR

   Managed the full computing environment for a medical SaaS that processed the rendering of most CT and MR scans in the US: cloud on AWS and Azure, VMware virtualization, HPE hardware, DICOM post-processing and GPU rendering for image analysis.

   • Designed, developed and maintained a HIPAA-compliant hybrid environment.
   • Deployed containerized serverless compute on AWS ECS and Azure.
   • Owned uptime and deployment for the Software Center of Excellence.
   • Designed and built out a data center, and planned and managed the headquarters move.
   • Migrated local source systems with disparate database schemas to the cloud.

   Platforms

   AWS · Azure · ECS · VMware · HPE · DICOM

Tenure bars share one scale, from August 2017 to today, with a tick at each new year.

Knowledge base

PostgreSQL 16 holding cards, the Comprehensive Rules, combos, deck lists and tournament results, loaded from Scryfall, Commander Spellbook, EDHREC, Moxfield, Archidekt, EDHTop16 and TopDeck.gg. Nine systemd timers keep it current, and every answer keeps its source.

Statistics

Matchups are judged with an exact sign test, and only pairs that survive a Benjamini-Hochberg false-discovery correction are shown: on September 10, 2 of 302 tested pairs did. Commander conversion is tested against its own field, and seat advantage is measured over thousands of pods.

Deck analysis

Import a Moxfield or Archidekt deck and see its curve, color demands, combos, and the tournament packages it has assembled or sits one card away from.

MCP server

Thirteen tools let language models query the knowledge base instead of recalling it, with provenance on every answer. One explains which lines a commander runs, and why its near misses exist.

Operations

The app, PostgreSQL and nginx share one small EC2 instance behind Let's Encrypt TLS. Deploys are scripted and health-checked, and roll back on failure.

commander_packages(commander="Kinnan")
"Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy runs one line: Kinnan + Basalt Monolith,
 complete in 95.4% of 693 tournament lists."

Platforms

IIS · WebLogic · WebSphere · Tomcat · JBoss

Languages

C# · C++ · Java · JavaScript · Python · PowerShell · SQL

Web

ASP.NET MVC · Blazor · React · REST APIs

Data

PostgreSQL · MySQL

Cloud

AWS · Azure · Docker · Kubernetes

Infrastructure

VMware · HPE · Networking · Infrastructure as code

Security

SSL/TLS · Keystores · Ciphers · HIPAA-compliant environments

Operations

DR planning · Capacity management · Incident management · Design consultation

1. 01

   Render the change first

   Generate what a script will install and diff it against what is live before running it for real.

2. 02

   Keep secrets out of the output

   Tokens and passwords live in root-owned files. Scripts read them without printing them, and logs never carry them.

3. 03

   Verify from the far side

   A green service status only means a process started. I check what a user actually gets, through the public URL.

4. 04

   Merge what is proven

   Work lands on main once it is verified in production, and every deploy keeps the previous build ready to roll back to.