Clark Ritchie

❇️ Clark Ritchie

A Senior Staff Platform / Site Reliabilty Engineer with a diverse background of experiences. Hands-on building and operating scalable SaaS cloud-native systems for over 15 years as both an IC and leader.

I am passionate about building and operating world-class applications that delight its end users.

Connect with me on:

LinkedIn
GitHub
Or use Calendly to get onto my calendar

💬 TL;DR

Core skills: Linux, Terraform, Docker and containers (Kubernetes, Elastic Container Service, Docker Swarm), Go (Golang), Python, CI/CD, cloud (AWS, GCP), and loads of experience with tools like GitHub Actions
I am a developer, but also very close to infrastructure
I approach software development with an SRE’s mindset – scalability, fault-tolerance, optimizing spend, monitoring and alerting – these things, and more, are always part of my thinking
Sometimes good is better than perfect; I like to ship early and ship often
Let’s go!

📌 Career TL;DR

BS in Computer Science, Univ. of Puget Sound (‘96)
Early career — Intel factory automation, Hewlett-Packard, a startup (’96-’11)
MS in Computer Science, Oregon State Univ. (‘01)
Experience at 4 startups
12 years writing software for fixed wireless networks in US low-income and throughout East Africa, Haiti, The Philippines
Co-founded an ISP in Kenya (’13-’18)
5 Years as Platform Engineer at Specialized Bicycle Components (’18-’23)
Principal Engineer at Blueboard, a failed HR SaaS startup (’23-’24)
My current role is as a Senior Staff SRE Software Engineer at Dexcom

Current Stack

These days I am using Kubernetes (GKE), Helm charts, GitHub Actions, Cloud SQL (MySQL, Postgres), Cassandra, Spanner, Python, Go, Crossplane (for IaC), GCP and Datadog.

🗒️ Random Things on my GitHub

A lot of this is elementary stuff – sometimes I use these just to prove out a basic concept or maybe to provide myself a template for future use. Some of the Terraform is more sophisticated.

VS Code Dev Containers

Go Things

Basic Go Things
- gRPC – gRPC example of a “Hello World” server in Go, with clients in Go and Python
Produce camelCased JSON from a Go Struct – I was asked in an interview how to do this… I’ve always referred to this technique as “JSON Hints”, but maybe that’s incorrect? I think that json.Marshal was all they were looking for.

Terraform Things

GitHub for doing things with GitHub repos
s3-static-hosting Very simple web hosting on S3, no https
s3-remote-state Terraform to create the Terraform backend state on AWS, so meta
The Docker Swarm section is a series of bespoke Terraform projects I made to create a VPC, subnets, EC2s, ELBs, bootstrap a Docker Swarm cluster, stand up Postgres and MySQL (Serverless) and Elasticache (Redis) instances, as well as SNS for alarms, and more
- aws-alarm-infrastructure
- aws-docker-swarm – This is the base layer, the others mostly use outputs from this
- aws-elasticache-redis
- aws-mysql-rds
- aws-postgres-rds
AWS Guard Duty A truly minimalistic setup of Guard Duty

Python Things

Basic Python Things
Go shared lib – The Sieve of Sundaram in Python (native) versus it in Python, but with the heavy lifting done in Go (code compiled to a .so file)
Quick and dirty Python script to delete old branches – this is more or less the the same thing in a shell script

Docker Things

Kubernetes Things – Hello world stuff from when I was just getting started with Kubernetes and Helm charts
Simple example of how you might use Docker Compose to run a small Fast API server that can reach a Maria DB database
Shell script to tag a container with a semvar+sha

GitHub Actions Things

Full example of the GHA ‘context’ object
Shell script to delete all workflow runs
Read Secure Notes from 1Password and push to GitHub Secrets (see above) but in a GHA – this is the way
If you must do a nested ternary in GHA
Trick GHA into revealing a secret – yes, this is possible!
This is cool – use Python in a GHA step
Trigger a GHA with a workflow_dispatch outside of the main branch like this
I made this Python script to read Secure Notes from 1Password and push to GitHub Secrets – this is very bespoke but is how I once used 1Password Notes as the “source of truth” for env vars which were stored as GitHub secrets (environment, repository or organization) – this code was originally forked from someone else’s project but heavily modified for my needs
Example of how you might lint in a GHA – this example is for Terraform, but could be used to lint Python code with Ruff, etc.

Random Things

A few things that I made to make copying a Postgres db from Heroku to RDS a little easier
List, Copy, Delete S3 Bucket
Cloudflare maintenance page worker
tickr-rpi-ws281x – This was a small side project to control a programmable LED light strip using heart rate data from a Wahoo TICKR heart rate monitor – I never finished this… the Bluetooth to the TICKR part works, IIRC
Manage Cloudflare records
Nexus 7 Deployment Script – Something I did over 10 years ago to speed up deploying a bunch of Google tablets
Sort a 1Password Note from the command line, uses the 1Password CLI
trails.losritchi.es is a tiny SPA (React) I made to help me name my mountain bike rides for Strava, it lives here

Additional other random notes and code snippets that I did not explicitly link to are here

Not Mine

A neat search and replace shell hack for use with the Silver Searcher

Here are some excellent Gists by Andrew Zurn on how to use Ollama to write your PRs for you (and other things):