Ying Yang Gear

Tao Ex Machina

The Way from a machine

Project blog by Tim Heath

Things that are forced, grow for a while
but then wither away -Lao Tzu

About Me


I am Tim

A hacker, maker, tinkerer who is almost constantly fascinated by the world around me. I have aspirations to be an engineer, teacher, inventor, and all-around cyberpunk wizard.

Born and raised in NH. Did all of my schooling at Franklin Public Schools, and participated in a large list of extracuriculars and clubs. Boy Scouts, Grange, Little Leauge, rec-center basket ball, Archery, Odysey of the Mind, Destination Imagination, Student Leadership, Drama, and Chorus.

I moved to the Rocket City in January 2008, and met up with an amazing group of fellow creatives and engineers at Makers Local 256. We worked on wild and crazy projects, helped teach and learn electronics, programming, and rapid prototyping. I started attending InfoSec conferences, and building on my skills and experiences.

Education and Certification


L2: cPanel Professional Certification: Technical

2015 - university.cpanel.net

Associate of Applied Science

2009-2013 - Attended Calhoun Community College, Huntsville, AL
(incomplete)

Digium Certified Asterisk Profesional (dCAP)

2010 - Huntsvile, AL

Computer Service and Repair course

2001 - Huot Technical Center, Laconia, NH

Work History


DevOps Engineer

November 2018 - present
Alteryx, Broomfield, CO
Deploying and maintaining build infrastructure with Terraform and Chef.
Expanded deployment of Zabbix Monitoring, Grafana Dashboards, and ELK log agrigation and searching.
Planned and executed migration of Artifactory from on-prem to AWS.
Supporting CICD Pipelines in Jenkins and Gitlab.
Working with Alteryx data analytics workflows and machine learning.

Systems Administrator

July 2014 - July 2018
Alpha Hosting (formerly Simple Helix), Huntsville, AL
Provision and maintain physical and virtual servers in VMWare, Citrix Xen, and Proxmox.
Provide internal support and escalation for our Support Technicians.
Respond to alerts for outages, diagnosing the issue and working to resolve it.
Find and test new software and services to evaluate usefulness for the company.
Worked rotating shifts for 1st, 2nd, and 3rds, as well as on-call admin as needed.
Travel to conferences to represent the company to potential customers and partners.
Install, cable, and manage server equipment within a Teir III data center. (HP/Juniper)
Worked as a part of admin team to migrate all services to a new datacenter.
Filled in for sales calls and emails as well.
Troubleshoot customer issues over email, phone, and live chat.
Troubleshoot server applications such as: Apache, Lightspeed, Mysql, Exim, and DNS.
Troubleshoot various web software platforms including: Magento, Wordpress, Mediawiki.
Received “Tech of the Month” award 3 times.
Promoted to System Administrator from tech support.

Programmer Technician

April 2015-July 2015
National Scale Mesurment Speciallists, Huntsville, AL
Managed software projects through GitLab.
Assisted with building and updating an internal application from Delphi to QT.
Helped to configure and deploy Ethernet to serial interface for CNC machines.

Logistics Technical Specialist

April 2014-July 2014
Digium Inc. Huntsville, AL
Triage and perform failure analysis of returned phones, appliances, servers, and add-on cards.
Flag repeat issues to investigate possible quality assurance or hardware design issues.
Work with Technical Support to improve troubleshooting procedures.
Work with Hardware Engineering to improve products.

Warehouse Technician

January 2014-April 2014
Wide Open West, Huntsville, AL
Update firmware on digital transport adapters (DTA).
Planned and documented DTA equipment testing procedures.
Assists with additional warehouse operations as needed

Co-founder / Hardware Engineer

August 2010 – April 2015
Meatstand Electronics (self), Huntsville, AL
Design, prototype, and build Open Source Hardware projects
PCB Layout in Eagle and gEDA/PCB.
Assembly of electronics and kits.
Provided hardware design for 2FA token and various other prototypes.
Developed and sold Soldering class training kit.
Developed and sold Guitar amplifier module.

Technical Support Technician

March 2010-June 2013
Digium Inc. Huntsville, AL
Troubleshot GNU/Linux based telephony systems over email and phone.
Answered customer questions and concerns regarding products.
Actively worked with other departments to solve customers' issues.
Rotated to third shift to receive international and emergency calls and resolve issues.
Read and comprehend international telephony standards and guidelines.
Sought additional responsibilities maintaining the department's computer lab.

Pharmacy Technician

May 2008-July 2009
Sunscript, Huntsville, AL
Filling prescriptions. Sorting/counting pills.
Preparation, printing, and sorting of delivery totes and manifests.
Occasional repair of fax machines.

Computer Consultant and Repair Tech

September 2006-January 2007
Franklin Career Academy, Franklin NH
Maintained and repaired school computers including laptops and servers.
Administrator over the school’s Active Directory and Window Server 2003.
Trained faculty and students on various systems and software packages.
Worked on-call hours for resolving emergency issues.

Delivery Driver

June 2005-December 2007
NeighborCare, Pembroke NH
Preparation, printing, and sorting of delivery manifests as well as the subsequent delivery of pharmaceuticals and med-supplies.

Freelance Computer Repair

July 2002-2008
Built, setup, and repaired home computers and networks.

Technology Coordinator's Assistant

May 2002-June2002
Franklin School District, Franklin NH
Clean and repair computers and computer labs in preparation for the next school year.

Warehouse and Service Technician

June 2000-August 2001
NeighborCare, Pembroke NH
Order picking, shipping and recieivng.
Service and repair of home medical equipment for rentals.