| c/o 508 Duke St West | pnijjar at alumni.uwaterloo.ca |
| Kitchener, ON | http://pnijjar.freeshell.org/tag/tech |
| N2H 3Y8 | https://github.com/pnijjar |
Taken on assorted community-oriented tech projects. A few highlights:
Systems administration (approximately SAGE Level III) and user support for an ambitious nonprofit with a frugal budget. IT infrastructure ranges from employment counsellor workstations to medical clinics, with lots in between. A few highlights:
Replaced manual imaging and non-existent third party updates with automated installers (Windows WAIK, Debian/Ubuntu preseeding) and package deployment (WPKG, WSUS, wsusoffline, some Saltstack) while maintaining license compliance.
Developed streamlined waiting list/alerting webapp and desktop client (Django, wxPython).
Scripted Windows update infrastructure to work around rollback software deficiencies (Powershell).
Completed major redesign of http://www.theworkingcentre.org (Drupal 6).
Sanitized and isolated network infrastructure (pfSense, Cisco switches); connected six remote locations into one domain (OpenVPN, DFS); safely enabled employees to work from home (Hamachi, OpenVPN).
Mentored coworkers and helped them solve their issues; patiently helped end-users of all skill levels.
Administered domain (Active Directory on Server 2008 R2) and mail servers (Exchange 2010, Exim); designed and implement company-wide backup infrastructure (Backup Exec, rsync).
Built out monitoring (Nagios, Cacti, and others) and ticketing (Request Tracker) systems for internal IT use.
Wrote end-user documentation about viruses and spyware (Sphinx). See http://cr-handouts.dyn.theworkingcentre.org .
Maintain phone infrastructure (mostly legacy Norstar equipment, some VoIP, some Asterisk).
Taught several first-year computer science courses, ranging from ACM CS0 (how to use computer applications) through ACM CS2 (introductory data structures and algorithm analysis). Worked to engage students and improve their experience (for example, by getting login shells changed from csh to tcsh in computer labs). Some comments:
"Explained work very well. Never hesitated to go over stuff to ensure we understood."
"I liked the demos, his humour. He was very down to earth and was like an equal. I also appreciated that he took comments after classes and acted on those comments to improve the course for us."
Class sizes ranged from 20-80 students, and were usually coordinated with teaching assistants and other lecture sections.
University of Waterloo, 1999-2004. Supervisor: Dale Schuurmans.
Thesis topic: "An Attempt to Automate NP-Hardness Reductions via Second-Order Existential Logic."
University of Toronto at Mississauga, 1995-1999
Honours B.Sc with High Distinction. Major: Computer Science. Minors: Mathematics, English.