Ethan Girouard

New York Department of Transportation / WebNY Building • Albany, NY • Albany, NY

About

WebNY provides web development, hosting, and support for over 100 websites for the New York State government.

Day-To-Day Activities

On the Platform team, we are responsible for ensuring website availability and resilience against bot traffic and DDoS attacks. We use Cloudflare's firewall services to protect against malicious traffic that drives up hosting costs and brings down websites, and take both a proactive and reactive approach to traffic management. The Platform team is also responsible for managing website TLS certificates, backups, and engineering traffic routes between customers, translation services, Cloudflare, and on-premisis and cloud-hosted sites.

Cloudflare Pages Migration Docs

One of the first things I did at WebNY was to extensively research Cloudflare Pages, and provide documentation for how we would migrate many of the static assets used by ny.gov sites, including the universal navigation bar that shows on all sites. This documentation covered how to deploy to Cloudflare Pages from GitHub, roll back deployments, assign domain names to deployment versions, and more, contributing to a successful migration to Cloudflare Pages.

Cloudflare Dashboard

Traffic for ny.gov sites flows through Cloudflare before reaching the origin servers, and WebNY sites receives millions requests every day. Part of the platform team's job is to monitor this traffic for bots and malicious actors, and block any generating excess traffic. The Cloudflare Dashboard is a webpage written using PHP to fetch data from Cloudflare and display it in an intuitive manner for analysis by the platform team. The Cloudflare Dashboard also uses jQuery on the frontend, and is served by Apache. The dashboard helps the platform team drive down bot traffic and reduces hosting costs.

Acquia Permissions Audit Utility

Another responsibility of the WebNY platform team is to manage accounts in our hosting provider, Acquia. To help with this, I developed a series of PHP scripts to fetch data from the Acquia API and create spreadsheets containing aggregated information about user accounts, roles, permissions, and deployed websites.

Website Database Backup Scripts

To protect against data loss and to meet New York State legal requirements, the Platform team also manages website database backups. To automate this process, I developed a set of PHP scripts that handle creating, downloading, and cleanup of these backups, issuing alerts to the team if the process fails.

Grand Prize • Troy, NY

About

Zedbruh is a small startup of three RPI students, founded in November 2023.

Tech Valley Center of Gravity 2023 Smart Cities Hackaton

We were very successful in competing in the Tech Valley Center of Gravity Hackaton, where our team developed a LoRa mesh-networked IoT sensor to capture information about a building environment and present it on a dashboard. In addition to displaying raw sensor data, this dashboard provided recommendations on potential building upgrades to improve the building efficiency and living/working environment for inhabitants. We received two awards, including the overall best solution.

CTO Responsibilities

As the CTO I am responsible for building and maintaining our hosting architecture and internal company services. This consists of managing several servers in our Kubernetes cluster, and deploying and administrating our centralized authentication service, Git server, and monitoring services, and configuring SSL and DNS as needed.

EFI Office • Londonderry, NH

About

Electronics for Imaging is an international digital printing technology company whose offerings include industrial printers for roll-to-roll media, cardboard and packaging, textiles, and more. EFI represents a sizable portion of the industrial printer market, making advancements in printing speed and resolution, and ink chemistry. I worked in the headquarter office in Londonderry, NH, which focuses on the development of sheet and roll-to-roll wide-format inkjet printers.

Hardware Control Utility

The Hardware Control Utility is a C++ wxWidgets application that runs on the Denali H13 printer and offers control of hardware on the machine for service and testing. The tool communicates with printer devices using PowerLink and CORBA to run pumps, actuate solenoids, move belts, and monitor ink systems. The application is used by engineers and service technicians for diagnosing issues with printers and has shown to decrease maintenance turnaround times and improve the initial ink-up process.

Printer Configuration Reload System

Printer configuration is spread out across several Lua files that manage all systems on the machine, and often need to be modified for testing purposes. Traditionally, this configuration was read only at software startup, and any configuration changes required restarting the printer software, taking up to 10 minutes. I designed a system to monitor these files for changes at runtime, and reload individual software components as necessary to reflect updated configuration. This tool allows for rapid change testing, increasing development iteration speed

2022 NH/VT States • Manchester, NH

About

VEX Robotics is a high school robotics competition where teams of students design, build, and program robots to compete in a series of challenges. The competition is held at the local, state, and world level, and is a great way for students to learn about engineering, programming, and teamwork. Each year, a new game is released, and teams have a few months to design and build a robot to compete in the game.

Role on Team 99119A

As a member on Team 99119A, I mostly focused on the programming of our team's robot. This involved writing code in C++ to control the robot's motors, and react in real-time to sensor feedback. In VEX matches, there is also a 15-second autonomous period where the robot must operate without human input, and I was responsible for writing the code that controlled the robot during this period. I also helped with the design and construction of the robot, and with documenting our team's progress and decisions. In 2022 our team won the Design Award at the NH/VT state championship, earning us a spot at Worlds in Dallas.

About

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a private research university in Troy, NY. RPI is known for its engineering and computer science programs.

Coursework

Notable courses include:

• Cryptography and Network Security
• Network Security and Defense
• Programming in Haskell
• Database Systems
• Frontiers of Network Science

Achievements

• GPA 3.76
• Dean's List
• Letter of recognition for performance in Data Structures course
• Rensselaer Medal Award (2021)

About

Plymouth Regional High School is a public high school in Plymouth, NH.

Achievements

• GPA 99.66
• Third Honors

LibreTunes Home Page

About

LibreTunes is an open source music player that provides a web interface to manage and listen to a library of audio files. It provides all the features of common music players, such as playlists, queues, liked songs, and brings some innovative features to make listening to music with friends easier. LibreTunes will support a shared queue, allowing multiple users to add songs to a queue from their devices, and synchronized listening, allowing two users to listen to the same songs together. LibreTunes also provides tools for managing a music library, such as a duplicate song finder, and tools for adding new songs and managing metadata.

Tech Stack

LibreTunes is developed in Rust using the Leptos web framework.

Team Lead Role

LibreTunes started as a Rensselaer Center for Open Source project, and I was the team lead for the project.

Home Page

About

Interniverse is a student-driven online community for finding and discussing internships, with peers at your institution. It allows students to post comments on job position listings to describe their experience in an internship position, and how they feel about the company.

Tech Stack

Interniverse is developed in Rust using the Leptos web framework.

AI Generated Pull Request Review • Montreal, QC

About

DevMan is a DevSecOps pipeline developed for the open-source project Cal.com. We built this pipeline for the ConUHacks VIII hackathon. In addition to the pipeline, we developed an AI-powered pull request reviewer to help maintainers of the project quickly and accurately review pull requests.

ConUHacks VIII Prize

DevMan won the DevSecOps challenge sponsored by the Canadian Communications Security Establishment.

Tech Stack

Our DevSecOps pipeline is built for GitLab, and is deployed on Kubernetes. Our AI pull request reviewer uses llama.cpp to run AI models, with wrapper code written in Python.

Video Player • Worcester, MA

About

TermLingus is a way to browse and watch YouTube videos from your terminal, complete with a home page, search, and video player.

Tech Stack

We used a C++ wrapper around ffmpeg to decode videos and display them using text, and some Python to interact with the YouTube API.

RCOS Presentation Poster

About

FinVis is a web application that allows users to track their investments across multiple stock trading exchanges. The app provides a dashboard with an overview of the user's portfolio, and detailed information about each stock in the portfolio. Users can add and remove stocks from their portfolio, and view historical performance data for each stock.

Team Lead Role

FinVis was a Rensselaer Center for Open Source project, and I was the team lead for the project.

Tech Stack

FinVis is developed using Next.js, React, and MongoDB.

Testing the Hall Effect Sensor • Plymouth, NH

About

The AutoBoard is a physical chess board that can move pieces around the board by itself with no human intervention, as well as detect when a piece is moved by a human player. The board can be used as a standard game board, an interface to popular online chess site Lichess.org to play against online players, or to play against the built-in computer offline. The board also features an “idle” mode, in which live or historical games are streamed from Lichess.

Design

The AutoBoard uses a grid of 96 hall effect sensors to detect pieces on and off the chess board. It uses a CoreXY motion system with two stepper motors to drive a carriage underneath the board to move pieces around.

Current Issue

About

Soteria is a web app to connect people with e-waste at college campuses with people who have a need for it or can recycle or dispose of it properly. The app allows users to post items they no longer need, and other users can claim them. The app also provides information on how to properly dispose of e-waste.

HackRPI 2022 Prize

Soteria won the Best Use of Google Cloud and Best in Sustainability prizes at HackRPI 2022.

Tech Stack

Soteria is built using React and TailwindCSS on top of Google Firebase.

Web Interface

About

CarpeHora is a time-tracking WearOS and web app that allows users to track how they spend their time throughout the day. The app provides a simple interface for users to start and stop timers for different activities, and provides reports on how much time was spent on each activity. The app also provides a web interface for viewing and exporting data, and for setting goals and reminders.

Tech Stack

CarpeHora's WearOS app is built in Java using Android Studio. The web interface was made using React, Next.js, and TailwindCSS.

About

As a hobby, I run a NixOS server with various open-source self-hosted services for personal use. Over the years, I have changed the way I host and expose services on the network, and have learned a lot about server administration, security, and networking.

Services

• llama.cpp
• Coder
• OpenCloud
• TubeArchivist
• Gitea
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• VictoriaLogs
• Traefik
• Matrix / Synapse
• Scrutiny
• Jellyfin
• Immich
• Syncthing
• Wireguard VPN
• Kiwix
• Authentik
• Matchering
• Home Assistant
• Calibre Web
• Memos
• ntfy
• SearXNG
• Pydio Cells
• AdGuard
• Stalwart
• n8n
• Glance
• Radicale
• Nepenthes
• Anki Sync
• LibreSpeed
• Tandoor
• Stirling PDF
• Dufs
• Bitwarden
• MQTT Broker
• PairDrop
• Xonotic
• FreshRSS
• PrivateBin
• Linkwarden
• MQTT Broker
• Home Assistant
• Linkwarden

Hosting Setup

Currently I run a NixOS server and deploy services in Docker. I use Traefik for reverse proxy and TLS certificates, and Prometheus + Grafana and ntfy for monitoring and notifications. I'd love to move back to my Kubernetes and Rook Ceph setup at some point, when I get more hardware.