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Luke Winikates

Observability @Gusto (formerly @VMware Tanzu, @Pivotal)

Luke Winikates is a Staff Software Engineer at Gusto, specializing in observability and infrastructure. With over 15 years of experience in software engineering, he has a strong background in full-stack development, particularly in backend technologies such as Kubernetes and infrastructure automation.

Professional Experience

  • Gusto: Currently serves as a Staff Software Engineer, focusing on observability and infrastructure.
  • VMware Tanzu: Previously worked as a Staff Software Engineer for nearly three years, where he led a product team and contributed to open-source projects. He was instrumental in delivering a new product that generated $7 million in annual recurring revenue within 18 months.
  • Pivotal Tracker: Held the position of Principal Software Engineer, where he significantly reduced infrastructure costs by migrating services to Kubernetes and improved service reliability.

Education

Luke holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University Bloomington, where he studied Japanese, Comparative Literature, and Anthropology. He also spent time as an exchange student at Nanzan University in Japan.

Skills

He is proficient in various programming languages and technologies, including:

  • Go
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Kubernetes
  • Prometheus
  • Telegraf

Languages

Luke is fluent in Japanese, having native or bilingual proficiency.

His career reflects a commitment to sustainable development practices and improving customer experiences through technology.

Highlights

May 10 · linkedin

Continuing my Homelab theme, I spent some time this week writing a command-line utility and a client library for the Synology API, starting with the Synology feature I use most - the Container Manager. My main use case is restarting containers like Prometheus when I change their configuration files. Years of working with Kubernetes and CF made me want command-line tools for my at-home hosting platform too.

https://lnkd.in/gWBYfiYZ

May 3 · linkedin

I felt like writing some Go this week, and decided to put together something to monitor my home router. I started running Prometheus on my Synology NAS a while back, and it got me interested in monitoring more of the devices that I run at home. The router had been on my list for a while, since it’s an important part of the home network. But Prometheus can’t scrape my home router’s metrics directly - so I wrote a custom exporter!

https://lnkd.in/gnFBfv7e

It was fun deciphering the variable names and adapting the raw metrics to follow Prometheus naming conventions, then charting them in Grafana.

Also fun trying some Github Actions features that I hadn’t used before and using my own custom-built container image on the Synology for the first time.

Related Questions

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Luke Winikates
Luke Winikates, photo 1
Luke Winikates, photo 2
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Location

Greater Seattle Area