Connor Law

Automated Migration when Nobody Else Could

Our company had two tenants of the same software, an IT Passwords Management tool. The company was looking to merge the two instances into one. This wasn't a problem for most aspects of the software, the vendor was able to transfer the data from one tenant to another. However, an old and poorly maintained feature existed which allowed a couple of important clients to access and store passwords in the system as well.

The vendor stated a migration was not possible and we would have to move these clients over to another software. This software change would have been a significant cost to the client at a bad time. Another option of manually migrating the content would have taken over 40 hours. The most senior employee at the vendor said 'I basically wrote the book on this stuff, if there was a way to migrate that, I would know.'

I opened up developer tools and could see the software used a relatively simple API. In four hours, instead of the 40 that would have otherwise been required, I quietly reverse engineered the API and was able to export all the usernames, passwords, OTP codes, notes, and critically the permissions after grabbing the access token from developer tools. I then had a similar script that used the API on the other tenant we had to import the data, a mirror replica.

Both the CTO and Vendor were taken aback. Someone who was supposedly just an IT Professional pulled off what the vendor refused to do with no in-house knowledge in a couple hours.

Minecraft Cloud Hosting Platform

I was the primary developer of a full feature cloud hosting platform that provided Minecraft Services, part of a three person partnership where the other partners focused on business operations.

I crafted a distributed system that facilitated multiple geographically distributed datacenters allowing our services to be closest to customers. Minecraft game servers were provisioned and updated automatically using one of five popular server software, and all the settings could be configured by the customer using a dashboard I custom built.

The infrastructure management platform (that installed, updated, started, monitored, and controlled the Minecraft processes and resources allocations) was written in Java, as well as a heavily modified Minecraft Reverse proxy that integrated into the environment and routed players to their server.

Account management and billing functions were provided by a PHP API, and the website and purpose built management dashboard were written in plain HTML/CSS/JS with Jquery.

Omega Minecraft had most of it's systems written and technical challenges solved, I wrote over 10,000 lines of code for the project, however the company was closed prior to launch due to lack of funding and changing needs for partners. This project is still a good demonstration of my programming expertise. A video tour of some of the internal services is still available, though the audio admittedly isn't great because I was sick when this was recorded.

Automated Account Provisioning from the Student Information System

I worked for a school utilizing Google Accounts and PowerSchool SIS (Student Information System). My role had been manually creating accounts for every student (over 1,200) for years. I created an integration with the SIS that ran nightly and would check for any student who enrolled or unenrolled. Newly enrolled students would have an account automatically setup with our email template, default passwords (which varied by grade level), and were automatically added to relevant distribution lists.

Students who unenrolled would automatically have their account suspended, which also solved a previously large problem of lots of stale accounts for students who had graduated or unenrolled. This also allowed me much more time to focus on more important duties.

Multiple Cloud Transitions

I have worked on many cloud migration and transition processes, with companies that had very diverse on-prem environments.

From doing the leg work of migrating individual computers from Active Directory Management to Entra ID + Intune, migrating group policies and local automations to cloud alternatives, I've seen it all.

I've always been a driver for security for cloud implementations. Each time I've worked in a new environment, security improves by a significant margin in the first three months. That includes more strictly enforcing MFA policies, implementing Conditional Access and Sign-On Risk Detection, enrolling devices in endpoint protection and ensuring their compliance. Businesses have large environments, so careful planning is required along with thorough execution to ensure full compliance and the best user experience with changes.

On-Prem systems still very much have a place in my heart - I host my own infrastructure, and it's the right solution for many types of businesses and industries, so I keep my system administration skills sharp.

PowerFi: Personal Finance Management

PowerFi is a SaaS personal finance solution that enables users to track their finances, monitor performance, and set goals. Data is loaded into PowerFi automatically from bank sources utilizing Plaid, an API Intermediary, data extracted from receipts using email scrubbing, photos of receipts, or manual entry.

Users can plan out income and expenses, allocating out the money they have such as budgeting for car insurance every six months, spending less than $100 on eating out each month, and earning wages every two weeks. The app alerts when approaching or breaching a budget, as well as making recommendations for budgets. For example, lowering the budget for items where the user has not utilized all the funds allocating to a category to commit more to savings, or adjusting the budget for a category that regularly violates the limits set.

There are additional statistical tools that help users identify trends in their finances and see data over a long period, like how much their wages have increased over many years working, how much money has been spent at a particular establishment over time, etc.

PowerFi is under active development and is written with a React Front End, Python/Flask backend, and MongoDB as a database. It's deployment is automated with full CI/CD, Ansible, and the backend modules utilizing containerization.

Bell Dispatcher

A niche piece of equipment needed in a school is a device that connects to the PA system and plays a bell tone. Ours ceased to work and a replacement was many months out.

I salvaged the Raspberry Pi out of a Vape Detector with a broken sensor and a relay module I had laying around. A simple python script connected with cron jobs triggered the relay which triggered the bell tone. I designed a 3D printed baseplate to connect all the components. This quick fix dispatched bells for a campus with 475 students for about five months.