Justin (randoneering)
(he/him)Infrastructure Engineer | pgFirstAid Creator | Kaneo Core Team Member | Open Source Evangelist | Nix/NixOS Maintainer
Founding Randoneer at Randoneering, LLC
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Career: 10
Founding Randoneer
Randoneering, LLC
Jun 2025 - Present
Founding Randoneer
Randoneering, LLC
Founder and Principal Engineer at Randoneering, LLC, where I provide fractional IT infrastructure support for startups and small businesses. I help clients build infrastructure from the ground up, improve and modernize existing systems, and provide short-term or retainer support when they need senior-level help. My focus is practical delivery, clear documentation, and training so clients can maintain what I build long after the engagement ends.
Core Team Member
Kaneo
Independent work
Jun 2026 - Present
Core Team Member
Kaneo
Independent work
- I help with contributions focused on Infrastructure, DevOps related tasks, and Security - Combined the original separated docker images into a single image to improve users ability to deploy Kaneo in their own environments. - Updated and published Kaneo's helm chart to ghrc for users looking to deploy Kaneo in their Kubernetes cluster(s) - Resolve infrastructure related issues opened by the community - Collaborate with the community to gather feedback on how we can improve the process of deploying Kaneo
Senior Data Engineer
RxBenefits, Inc.
Nov 2025 - Present
Senior Data Engineer
RxBenefits, Inc.
• Ensures data warehouse resilience, availability, recovery, maintenance, data integrity, and capacity planning requirements. • Provides a high degree of coordination between user, technical, application and corporate entities to ensure effective data management as a corporate enterprise. • Work with and provide mentorship and direction to the Data Engineer I to meet objectives • Understand and align pipeline development with business requirements • Capture and maintain metadata • Validate and monitor data integrity to ensure data quality • Identify ways to improve data reliability, efficiency, and quality • Tune SQL and pipelines to limit consumption spend • Recommend process improvements to the team
Creator/ Main Contributor
Independent work
Jun 2025 - Present
Creator/ Main Contributor
Independent work
https://github.com/randoneering/pgFirstAid Easy-to-deploy, open source PostgreSQL function (and view!) that provides a prioritized list of actions to improve database stability and performance.Inspired by Brent Ozar's FirstResponderKit for SQL Server, pgFirstAid is designed for everyone to use—not just DBAs! Get actionable health insights from your PostgreSQL database in seconds.
Senior Database Engineer
RxBenefits, Inc.
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Aug 2024 - Nov 2025
Senior Database Engineer
RxBenefits, Inc.
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
• Database Design and Implementation: Design, develop, and implement cloud-based database solutions in collaboration with development teams. • Cloud Database Administration: Manage, monitor, and optimize cloud database instances to ensure high availability, performance, and data integrity. Configure and maintain database backups, replication, and disaster recovery strategies. • Performance Tuning and Optimization: Identify and resolve database performance issues, including query optimization, index tuning, and resource utilization. Monitor database performance metrics and implement improvements to optimize performance. • Data Security and Compliance: Implement and maintain appropriate security measures and access controls to protect sensitive data stored in the cloud database. Ensure compliance with data protection regulations and industry best practices. • Database Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Monitor database activity and performance using database monitoring tools. Diagnose and resolve database-related issues and incidents, working closely with cross-functional teams to ensure timely resolution. • Database Capacity Planning: Estimate future database storage and performance requirements based on data growth projections. Plan and implement database capacity upgrades or scaling activities to accommodate evolving business needs. • Database Automation and Scripting: Develop and maintain database automation scripts, workflows, and configurations using scripting languages (e.g., SQL, Python) and infrastructure- as-code tools (e.g., Ansible). Implement CI/CD practices for database deployment and management. • Collaboration and Communication: Collaborate with DevOps, QA, and product development teams to understand database requirements, provide technical guidance, and ensure effective integration with other systems. Communicate database-related updates, issues, and recommendations to relevant stakeholders.
AWS Database Administrator/ DBRE
RxBenefits, Inc.
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Jun 2023 - Aug 2024
AWS Database Administrator/ DBRE
RxBenefits, Inc.
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
-Assess Database Performance - tuning, monitoring, and diagnosing -Enforce referential integrity, and ensure data quality -Create databases, schemas, tables, and views -Develop Performance Metrics or Standards -Manage and Assess Database Stack -Assist Data Engineers and other personnel with projects, requests, and troubleshooting.
AWS Database Administrator
Synoptic Data PBC
Oct 2022 - Jun 2023
AWS Database Administrator
Synoptic Data PBC
-Support Data Engineers and customers on their data requests through large data pulls or through the Mesonet API -Maintain AWS Data infrastructure -Provide advanced monitoring solutions for AWS services and enforce the company's SLAs -Architect supporting AWS infrastructure for future expansion and brainstorm ideas for new products for the business and free-tier customers
System And Database Administrator
ALDI USA
Aurora, Illinois
Contract Tester
uTest
Remote
Apr 2019 - Feb 2020
Contract Tester
uTest
Remote
Tester for hire for computer and mobile applications. Tester ID: 562056
IT Specialist/ QA Lead
ALDI USA
Batavia, IL
Skills: 77
Technical
Business
Interpersonal
Other
Projects: 2
Kaneo (Core Team Member)
github.com/usekaneo/kaneo
Jun 2026 - Present
Kaneo (Core Team Member)
github.com/usekaneo/kaneo
All you need. Nothing you don't. Open source project management that works for you, not against you. https://kaneo.app/
pgFirstAid
Mar 2025 - Present
pgFirstAid
Easy-to-deploy, open source PostgreSQL function (and view!) that provides a prioritized list of actions to improve database stability and performance.Inspired by Brent Ozar's FirstResponderKit for SQL Server, pgFirstAid is designed for everyone to use—not just DBAs! Get actionable health insights from your PostgreSQL database in seconds.
Talks & sessions: 2
15-30 min · anyone
Have you ever been asked to take a look at database in your company and just "improve performance" without any context? Or maybe walk into an "all hands" meeting to resolve a critical production issue with everyone pointing fingers at your database? I am sure we all have and use our go to tools to work our magic. One of my favorite tools is Brent Ozar's FirstRespondersKit. It gave you a detailed and quick snapshot of what was going on with your database and prioritized the things that were "fine" and the things that were "oh god please tell me this was done on accident." After close to a decade of being a DBA/System Admin, I wanted to build that same type of health check for PostgreSQL and make sure it was something the community could contribute to. So, I would like to show off pgFirstAid! Being a fairly new project, I would love for feedback and input on things we could do better or add to the health checks! So join me as I do a few quick demos and open the floor for comments, questions, and suggestions! https://github.com/randoneering/pgFirstAid
Five Stages Of Grieving-Databases in Infrastructure as Code
45 min · developers, database admins, devops, infrastructure engineers
You enter the call (or conference room) where you are greeted by some higher level executives and members of your Infrastructure team. They have been tasked with bootstrapping the company's IT Infrastructure and start building new resources with IaC. Luckily for you (or not), you have experience with this and are eager to prove your worth and show that DBAs can do more than yell at your poorly configured query or that you are using ORMs. While this situation happens to many of us, I rarely hear about the struggles folks have trying to implement a stateful resources (databases) in a stateless in environment consisting of stateless resources. Stages: Denial: This is just another resource to deploy with OpenTofu and most providers have resource blocks for their offerings! It has to work flawlessly! Anger: Deploy a blank database, easy. Deploy a database from snapshot, generally easy. But now I need to user three other providers just to initialize my database? $%@^@&@& Bargaining: If I just add one more provider, I swear this is going to work! Depression: My module is too complicated and now I am the only one that knows how it works. Acceptance: I will just build the module for single use, blank database deployments.... For your pleasure and amusement, I plan to walk you through my experience implementing this exact task and align the different phases of the implementation with Dr. Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving. Sit back and enjoy a few laughs, memes, and positive outlook on how we continue to create more gray area in daily work.
Publications: 24
pgFirstAid - hits 500 stars!
The World We Live In
pgFirstAid - Milestone 2 and 3!
pgFirstAid - PostgreSQL Health Check
Not Another AI Hype Train
SCALE 22x
Weekly Post (2025-01-25)
Weekly Post (2025-01-12)
Weekly Post (2025-01-05)
Weekly Post (2024-12-26)
Weekly Post (2024-12-15)
I swear I still write things.
DBRE Terraform Modules, Ansible-Playbooks, and my first Public Project
NixOS part 1.5
Stay awhile, and listen...to my nixOS journey!
Automate your dumps with Powershell(part 2)
Automate your dumps with Powershell(part 1)
FreshRSS, but using Docker Compose
FreshRSS RSS Feed Aggregator
When Two Weather Stations Walk Into A Bar
Upgraded SOL
Basic MariaDB Install Playbook
Credentials: 2
Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL)
ASTQB - Official Page - American Software Testing Qualifications Board
Education: 3
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Master of Library & Information Science (MLIS)
Monmouth College
Bachelor's degree
2010 - 2014
Monmouth College
Bachelor's degree
Activities / Societies: Rotaract Club, The Courier (School Newspaper), Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society, Mortar Board Senior Honor Society, Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society, Student Government, Colleges Against Cancer
American University
Education
Involvement: 1
Volunteering
United States Postgresql Association
Committee Member - Community Development Committee
Jun 2026 - Present
United States Postgresql Association
Committee Member - Community Development Committee
The mission of the Community Development Committee of the United States PostgreSQL Association is to develop participation in the PostgreSQL community through outreach programs and the support of educational endeavors for PostgreSQL users in the United States.
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