Evomedia.net

The natural evolution of your business.

Expertise

The natural evolution of your business.

Core skills — Kelly Michels, including AI Development and testing, software design and UI design, plus AWS operations.

AI Development

Python/NiceGUI, Node.js/Next.js, Visual Studio, with most common Enterprise IDEs and APIs. Token efficiency, prompt optimization, setup workflows, planning, model selection based on need for best results vs cost, and more.

Software design & UI design

Product and system thinking, information architecture, interaction patterns, visual hierarchy, and cohesive UI for web, mobile, desktop experiences — from early structure through implementation-ready layouts, muscle-memory workflows and more.

Full-stack development

End-to-end application delivery across two stacks: Python / NiceGUI (SQLAlchemy 2.x, Alembic, PostgreSQL, psycopg, Stripe billing, fpdf2 PDF generation, httpx/requests for external APIs) for data-driven apps, and Node.js / Next.js (TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma, React, Vite) for modern web and mobile — from schema design through Docker deploy.

QA & automation — SDET

Automated functional testing, regression, integration, end-to-end testing, visual validation, software accessibility testing. pytest, pytest-mock for unit and integration test suites. Including systematic QA of LLM systems — text-to-SQL correctness, retrieval, and guardrails — with a documented defect loop: QA Engineering for AI Systems.

CI/DI & DevOps

Jenkins, Artifactory, GitHub, Jira webhooks & triggers, optimized deployments, GitHub Planning and workflows.

API & scripting

API testing, Python, PHP, PowerShell, Cursor automation.

3D & AI domain

Autodesk AI MotionMaker, ML Toolkit, 3ds Max, 3D generalist, Maya pipelines, character animation validation, geometry workflows.

Support systems & infrastructure

Self-hosted mail (Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, Roundcube), SMTP relay via Brevo, monitoring dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, Node Exporter), automated TLS renewal, and operational tooling that keeps production stacks healthy around the clock.

Professional skills

Executive communication, technical documentation, cross-team collaboration, stakeholder alignment. Agile methodology in sprint-based workflows and similar iterative delivery frameworks.

AWS — setup, configuration, maintenance

Strong practical experience running production-facing sites and services on Amazon Web Services, end-to-end:

  • EC2: instance sizing, AMIs, SSH access, security groups, elastic IPs / DNS, patching rhythm, cost-aware choices. Running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with Docker and Docker Compose as the container runtime for all production workloads.
  • CloudFront CDN: distribution setup for www.evomedia.net, origin protocol policy configuration, AllViewer origin request policy to forward the correct Host header, debugging redirect loops caused by ALB HTTP→HTTPS interplay.
  • ALB (Application Load Balancer): listener rules, target group forwarding vs. redirect modes, wiring ALB origins to CloudFront without creating infinite redirect loops.
  • Route 53 DNS: full zone management — A records, CNAME, MX, SPF TXT, and DKIM TXT records. Configured authoritative DNS for evomedia.net including subdomains mail, webmail, mail-admin, and dashboard.
  • Multi-container Docker stacks: four independent Compose projects sharing a single external bridge network (web) — edge proxy, mail stack, monitoring stack, and website — each deployable and restartable independently.
  • nginx edge proxy: single-container ingress routing traffic to all backend services by server_name, HTTP→HTTPS redirects, WebSocket upgrade passthrough, correct reverse-proxy header forwarding (Host, X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Real-IP).
  • TLS & certificate management: Let’s Encrypt via Certbot in Docker (webroot ACME challenge), multi-SAN certificates covering all subdomains, automated daily renewal via cron with nginx hot-reload on success.
  • Mail server stack: docker-mailserver running Postfix (inbound SMTP), Dovecot (IMAP/TLS), Rspamd (spam filtering), and Fail2ban (intrusion prevention). Outbound relay via Brevo SMTP to work around AWS port-25 egress block. Roundcube webmail and a custom Flask mail-admin UI.
  • Monitoring & observability: Prometheus scraping six targets (Node Exporter, cAdvisor, nginx-exporter, postfix-exporter, itself, Grafana), 30-day metric retention, Grafana 13 dashboards for host metrics, container metrics, nginx, mail, and an evomedia overview. Email alerting via Grafana contact points for CPU, memory, disk, and mail-queue thresholds.
  • Security hardening: EC2 security groups scoped to required ports only, Fail2ban whitelisting internal Docker subnets, nginx CSRF-compliant proxy headers for Grafana 13, HSTS on all HTTPS vhosts.
  • Release & maintenance: repeatable deploy scripts (zdeploy.ps1, deploy_ec2.ps1) using SCP + SSH from Windows, smoke checks after deploy, 2 GB swap file for memory headroom, routine troubleshooting of container networking, iptables, and Docker DNS resolution.

Technical interests

3D printing & digital fabrication — model preparation, slicing optimization, geometry validation, printer calibration.