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Hi, I am Mike

Mike McDonald

Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services

I am a builder at heart and love tinkering and learning how things work. I began programming while working in Accounting where I saw an opportunity to automate repetitive month-end close procedures. After deciding I wanted to work on those types of problems full time, I went back to school and earned a degree in Computer Science. My favorite types of projects are the ones that automate, simplify and help my teams reduce the manual effort needed to get things done. In my role at AWS as a Containers specialist I get to work on those projects by assisting our partners with their GitOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as code and Containerization projects

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Certified Kubernetes Administrator
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate

Skills

Experience

1
Partner Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Dec 2021 - Present, Seattle

A leading provider of on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis.

Responsibilities:
  • Collaboration with AWS partners to understand their business objectives and customer requirements, providing architectural guidance, troubleshooting support, and best practices recommendations
  • Conduct workshops, training sessions, and knowledge transfer activities to help partners build technical expertise and expand their capabilities
  • Identify and address technical challenges, risks, and potential issues related to solution implementation, scalability, performance and security of partner solutions
  • Containers specialist community member, serving as a subject matter expert for partners and customers seeking assistance with Kubernetes, EKS and ECS solution planning and implementation
Accountant
Zillow

Sept 2019 - Jan 2021, Seattle

Zillow Group Inc is a real estate marketplace company providing information and services related to selling, buying, renting, and financing of real estate

Responsibilities:
  • Automated accounting close by identifying inefficiencies in existing processes, designing solutions, and training team members on the new methodology leading to increased timeliness and accuracy of financial statements
  • Collaborated with teams across all lines of business to gain deep understanding of assigned processes and accounts
  • Performed of Month, Quarter and Year end financial statement close duties, Balance sheet Reconciliations, supporting schedules, and SOX control ownership as needed
  • Participated in annual audit and quarterly review procedures performed by internal and external auditors
  • Investigated and prepared support for variance analysis of operating expenses used by management and financial planning teams
2

Education

University of Oregon
2020-2021
B.S. in Computer Science
GPA: 3.92 out of 4
University of Denver
2015-2016
M.S. in Accounting
GPA: 4 out of 4
Washington State University
2010-2014
B.S. in Economics
GPA: 3 out of 4

Projects

Assessment Management Internal Tooling
Assessment Management Internal Tooling
Contributor August 2022 - March 2023

React frontend and Lambda backend developed in Typescript. DynamoDB data storage to persist maturity assessment results for Partners, Assessment questionnaires and Partner data with single table design. Code hosted on private internal repository

professional typescript lambda dynamodb react serverless
EKS Blueprints cluster and container workload
EKS Blueprints cluster and container workload
Developer August 2022 - September 2022

Infrastructure as code defined EKS cluster using EKS blueprints framework, Running a Flutter frontend container and Python API backend container. Container images build and push to container registry automated through Github actions and deployed to the cluster with ArgoCD. CI/CD pipeline updating cluster configuration on changes to infrastructure repository.

hobby eks ecr docker ArgoCD infrastructure
Star
Flutter Frontend Container
Flutter Frontend Container
Developer August 2022 - September 2022

Flutter frontend container to run on the EKS blueprints cluster, simple autotrader style post feed to display post data from the API container

hobby flutter dart container
Star
Python API Backend Container
Python API Backend Container
Developer August 2022 - September 2022

Python API built using flask to access DynamoDB post data

hobby python api container flask dynamodb
Star
3 Tier Web Application
3 Tier Web Application
Developer November 2021 - December 2021

Java website application backed by an SQL database, Spring Security for authentication and authorization, Tomcat 9 server on AWS EC2 instance, SSL enabled with custom domain name

hobby database java website spring hibernate mysql tomcat rds
Star
Github Actions Testing Workflows
Github Actions Testing Workflows
Contributor July 2023 - Present

Github Actions bash scripts to generate a ConfigMap File and copy updated files over to a different testing branch for a Partner workload when a new Pull Request is opened, and to clear out the changed files when the Pull Request is closed

professional open source github bash scripting automation
Star