Rich Adams

Hi! I'm Rich. I spend my nights waking people up and fighting crime^*. I also write about programming and web related things (sometimes on the PagerDuty blog). You can check out my résumé if you're into that sort of thing. Say hi@richadams.me (use my PGP key if you like).

* The "fight crime" part might be made up...

• twitter › @r_adams
• github › richadams
• stackoverflow › rich-adams
• hacker news › richadams
• instagram › richaadams
• keybase › richadams
• speakerdeck › richadams
• linkedin › richaadams

Here's what I'm currently up to,

• Working on Security & Incident Response at PagerDuty, and occasionally writing posts for the PagerDuty blog.
• I am a sworn in disaster volunteer, acting as Comms Chief for my local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT).
• Editor for the VPC section of the Open Guide to Amazon Web Services, a practical guide to AWS.
• Teaching myself Japanese (日本語), enough to have conversations with people whenever I'm in Japan.
• Constantly changing the code for my photo album site (and trying to become a better photographer).
• Attempting to travel around the world, because I love to travel and visit new places.
• Being a dad, which it turns out, is harder than all the other stuff I'm doing combined. Who knew?!

Here's some things I did in the past,

• I worked on cool music related things for Sony while working at Gracenote.
• I worked on baggage related parts of Amadeus Altéa Departure Control, a global airline departure control system.
• I was a volunteer support administrator for LiveJournal (and wrote some helpful support tools).
• I used to jump out of planes for fun (here's me after my first RAPS jump in early 2000's).
• I was a projectionist for York Student Cinema in my student days, and saw too many movies to count.

Here's some things I've built,

• PagerDuty Security Training · Security training courses covering both general and engineer-specific topics.
• PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation · Collection of best practices and training material for incident response.
• PagerDuty Chrome Notifier · A Chrome extension to display desktop notifications for PagerDuty.
• Feed Baby Timeline Generator · Create graphs from data collected about baby feeding/sleeping routines.
• パチラジオ · Pachislo Radio, a randon playlist generator, built for Music Hack Day Tokyo (2014) and featured in wired.jp.
• Word Zombies · A HTML5 game (built for a 24hr hackathon), where you shoot zombies by typing.
• TrackTaste · A music recommendation engine I built for my final year Masters degree project.
• ...and there's a bunch of other small projects on my GitHub account.

Here are some things I've written, or talks I've given,

• "How to Respond to Any Crisis (IT or Otherwise) in an Organized Way" Podcast, The New Stack Context (Feb 2019)
• "Disseminating Knowledge: PagerDuty Open Sources Its Security Training" Article (Jan 2019)
• "PagerDuty Open Sources Its Incident Response Best Practices" Article (Jan 2019)
• "Our Approach to Employee Security Training" Blog Post (Mar 2018)
• "BabyDuty or: How PagerDuty Accidentally Prepared me for Fatherhood" Blog Post (Jul 2017)
• "Keeping PagerDuty Secure" Podcast, The Secure Developer (Jul 2017)
• "The Secure Developer: Keeping PagerDuty Secure" Blog Post (Jul 2017)
• PagerDuty Incident Response Training Talk, Multiple Events (Apr 2017 - Present)
• "Open-Sourcing Our Incident Response Documentation" Blog Post (Jan 2017)
• "PagerDuty's Failure Friday" Talk, Advanced AWS Meet-up (Dec 2015)
• "Site Reliability Engineering in the Cloud" Talk, USENIX SRECon14 (May 2014)
• "AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started" (Also published in Hacker Monthly Issue #46)Blog Post (Feb 2014)
• "Music Recommendation using Collaborative Filtering with Similarity Fusion" Academic Paper (May 2007)