>whoami
I am Kai Taylor. Obsessed, problem-solver, hacker, designer, tinkerer. I have been taking apart appliances from a young age just to figure out how they work. In my adult life this has translated into building cool electronic devices, just to see if I can.
When I am not building tiny micro-robots or Internet controlled rovers you may find me designing, building and launching model rockets at the park. I also enjoy maintaining my home network consisting of several smart devices, infrastructure, monitoring, and a handful of servers hosting everything from my personal development environment to internal applications used around the home.
Latest Projects
Some of my favorite (and most challenging) personal projects are highlighted below. These projects took countless hours of learning, planning, research, and development but ultimately produced beautiful results.
Micro-robot
Prototype design and development of a small ~35mm cubic robot cable of moving, detecting obstacles and demonstrating primitive behaviors. The robot features an AVR microcontroller, differential drive motors, onboard charging, and infrared obstacle detection. Read more…
Rockets
Design and development of a modified model rocket payload capable of carrying electronic devices including an altimeter, recovery buzzer, and eventually a tiny video camera. This project also included development of rocket finishing techniques and sewing of several custom parachutes. Read more…
Rover
Design and development of a semi-autonomous rover based on a commercial-off-the-shelf rover chassis, a Raspberry Pi and consumer webcam. Using readily available hardware allowed me to focus development on the control software allowing for real-time remote control with a laptop and joystick. Read more…
Skills, Experience, and Passion
AMAZON WEB SERVICES
- Advanced experience with AWS technologies including: EC2, RDS, ELB, Route53, EFS, S3, ElasticBeanstalk
- Experience managing site and application security with ACM, WAF, CloudFront
- Experience managing user access and encryption with KMS & IAM
- Advanced experience creating CloudWatch dashboards, monitors, and alerts
- Strong understanding of highly available architectures in AWS
INFOSEC AND GOVERNANCE
- Advanced experience developing security policies and procedures to meet compliance requirements
- Advanced familiarity with a variety of frameworks/standards for information/cyber security, privacy, and governance:
- ISO27001, NIST, HIPPA, GDPR, Privacy Shield, SOC2
- Experience conducting internal and external risk assessments, analysis, and mitigation programs
- Strong experience developing system hardening standards
DEVOPS AND SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION
- Advanced administration experience with Linux OS (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux/2)
- Experience automating deployment of systems and application configurations with Ansible
- Experience deploying containerized applicatiions with Docker
- Strong experience deploying complex web applications with Gitlab CI/CD
- Intermediate experience with Jenkins
PROGRAMMING AND SCRIPTING
- Strong experience developing applications and scripts in Python
- Strong experience with command-line scripting, Bash
- Intermediate familiarity with PHP, Javascript, C, Java, and Assembly
SECURITY AND PENETRATION TESTING
- Advanced experience automating systems audits through Elastic stack and related tools
- Intermediate experience in system and web application penetration testing
- Intermediate familiarity with Kali Linux OS and included tools
- Experience performing vulnerability assessments with MetaSploit, BurpSuite, and other penetration testing tools.
EMBEDDED HARDWARE
- Experience programming and assembling AVR Microcontroller circuits
- Experience designing, assembling, and debugging custom printed circuit boards
- Experience designing and developing 3D printed assemblies
LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION
- Fluent in written and spoken German language and customs
- Excellent technical communication and reporting skills regardless of technical level of audience