Charles N. Garrison
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GIGspace is the world’s first supplier-neutral online booking system for shared workspaces. With the current trend away from traditional offices to more dynamic ways of working, people need a reliable, trustworthy way to find workspaces that suit their lifestyle. We founded GIGspace to bridge the gap between workers and shared workspace owners. With GIGspace, workers can compare and book workspaces with a few easy clicks, and owners can reach more people without blowing their budget on advertising.
Garrison Computer Services helps companies automate their markePng database requirements. Notable projects include adding live chat via XMPP, designing mobile interfaces for social web applicaPons, and building integrated CRM and web applicaPons. Throughout my career, I’ve built a solid understanding of the full stack — from bits on the server disk drive to pixels on a user’s screen.
Make-Tracks Secure Hosting is a shared web and application hosting system. Using mod_perl and FastCGI, I’ve created a secure, reliable, and high-performance environment for a range of web applications. I manage servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and macOS X, as well as containers using everything from Xen to Docker.
Working with the Perl team on the MyDesktop product, I assessed a large backlog of technical issues and wrote plans to resolve them. Using my experience as a full-stack Perl developer, I helped the team update their codebase to modern, best-practice coding methods. I learned how to deploy various MyDesktop services to Kubernetes, eventually taking over management of stage and prod clusters and reducing cloud costs by nearly 40%.
During my time as Vice-President of Greens and Bowls Secretary, I created ClubTime, a site to make organising club bowling championships and tournaments easier and more efficient. I built the site to replicate the “on-field” experience of bowling tournaments; players can enter their scores via their phones and watch the progress of other games either through the website or on large screens inside the club.
With my skills as a full-stack developer, I assessed and wrote code updates for bugs and feature requests — including HTML/Javascript issues, database scaling, and job queue management. During my time at GritCode, I designed and implemented a migration path from bare-metal servers to an AWS server environment. This included writing an Ansible-based server deployment and management system which reduced deployment times to 30 minutes or less.
Within a small team, I ensured Exetel was compliant with the Australian government’s Metadata Retention Act. This involved designing and implementing security solutions — such as RSA key management with user permissions and encryption/validation of job queue data — and all front-end and back-end web components, including secure data exchange between components. I used RSA and CBC encryption to store encrypted data while still allowing indexed searching in an SQL database.
Using Unix, I diagnosed user connection problems, then created systems and wrote scripts to reduce these problems. It was here that I learned to configure and secure web and mail servers for Unix.
Working as a salesperson for general enquiries taught me how to help customers choose the best system for their particular needs. I brought my interest in the relatively new world of the Internet to the role by hosting a popular monthly Internet User’s Group for customers.
Working in phone support and software bug testing strengthened the solid foundation in technology that I formed as a curious kid. JAM Software taught me how to solve problems and incorporate user requests and bug testing into the software development cycle.