About Me

TL;DR: I love building stuff!

I am Jeff and I am an independent engineer and consultant. I am a certified cloud architect, with a background is in software engineering, DevOps, big-data, and natural language processing. I have earned many AWS and Google Cloud certifications. I am a software engineer at heart, but I enjoy everything from cloud architecture, to data and search, and, of course, AI/ML.

I am available to hire for consulting. I can help with your cloud (AWS/Google Cloud) architecture, software development, data pipelines, search, and NLP projects.

My AWS and Google Cloud Experience

I am proud to have a lot of AWS and Google Cloud certifications. Here are my certifications. My first AWS certifications were obtained in 2014. Back then the certifications had issue numbers! I am now fully AWS certified having achieved all certifications.

I have been an AWS SME (starting in February 2020) and an AWS Lead SME, which means I helped contribute to the development of the AWS certifications exams. I have found there is no better way to learn because writing wrong answers requires an in-depth knowledge of AWS! I "retired" as an AWS SME in 2023 to let others share in the rewarding opportunity.

I was an AWS Community Builder in 2023, 2022, and 2021, for Machine Learning.

About Search...

It's one thing to have good data, but it's only as good as your ability to efficiently retrieve it. I help folks make "search better" whether it's Amazon OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or something else. Check out my work on User Behavior Insights and in OpenSearch.

My Background

I have worked in many industries from government, security, healthcare, logistics, and education. I first started with cloud when AWS first launched around 2008.

My interest in natural language processing was sparked in 2012 when I was working with unstructured data and learning about the challenges in making it useful. That led me to the Apache OpenNLP project where I started contributing. Today, I am the chair of the Apache OpenNLP PMC (which just means I submit the project reports ;). I owe the Apache OpenNLP team a lot of gratitude for their help and guidance over the years. I added ONNX Runtime support to Apache OpenNLP to facilitate the use of large-language models from Java. Check out the blog post I wrote on the Microsoft website!

As a programmer, I started with QBasic, QuickBasic, and Visual Basic for DOS. I picked up C++ through Visual Studio 6 before moving to .NET. I moved to mostly Java around 2010 and have been there since. I also develop in Python and Go, and have experience with Scala. I do a lot of Bash, CloudFormation, and Terraform scripting and use Linux almost exclusively. Ubuntu has been my first pick since it was versioned using single digits and mailed out on CD-ROMs!

Check out my conference presentations below for a general idea of my favorite tools and areas.

My Work

Today, I do consulting primarily in the areas of cloud, data, search, and NLP through my company Mountain Fog. I enjoy tackling challenges around data ingestion, search, and AI/ML because those tasks often fall directly in the intersections of my primary interests.

I believe search is often overlooked yet very important because without the ability to efficiently locate data, the data is worthless. Vector search is now adding a new dimension to search - pun totally intended.

I am the maintainer of the Amazon OpenSearch User Behavior Insights plugin, and I try to be active in the OpenSearch community.

I created and maintain the Phileas project, along with the Philter software, under Philterd, LLC. Redacting PII and PHI from text is very challenging but equally important.

Connect

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• My Blog

My Work

Through Mountain Fog, I offer consulting services in the areas of cloud (AWS/GCP), data pipelines, search, and natural language processing (NLP).

I started Philterd to provide AI-powered software to redact PII. Learn more at www.philterd.ai.

Open Source

I am passionate about open source and try to contribute whenever possible. Where I'm most active:

Apache OpenNLP - I am a committer and PMC chair of the Java NLP library.

OpenSearch User Behavior Insights Plugin - I am a maintainer and developer of the OpenSearch plugin for search relevance.

Phileas - I am the creator and owner of the Java library for finding and redacting PII.

There are a lot of other PII-focused open source projects I've made on GitHub.