Richard Coffey
Azure Cloud Engineer
Dundalk, Ireland | 
(+353) 085 7088279
https://richardcoffey.com/ | 
contact@richardcoffey.com
https://linkedin.com/in/richard-coffey/
Professional Experience
Azure Cloud Engineer | HSE (July 2023 - Present)
Grade VII Officer working within the Irish public health service's eHealth and Disruptive Technologies department (A2i-HIDs unit) to design, maintain and optimise their Azure Cloud infrastructure and the applications hosted on them.
Applications Support Analyst | Pinergy (March 2022 - July 2023)
Pinergy is the leading renewable electricity provider in Ireland, helping homes and businesses to reduce energy costs and become more energy-efficient. Their technology stack comprises mostly of ASP.NET MVC apps written in C#, with a SQL Server backend hosted on AWS.
Key Responsibilities
- Administration duties across 365 in particular Exchange, Dynamics, Sharepoint, Azure AD and Intune.
- Handling numerous application and desktop support based tickets on a daily basis.
- Ongoing project IT based work both internally and with various external outsourced partners.
Key Accomplishments
- Migration of Freshdesk ticketing system to Jira, along with improved automation ticket rules.
- Developed Powershell scripts to streamline the on/offboarding of employees on Azure AD.
- Overhauled and updated our technical documentation in areas where it was lacking.
.NET Support Engineer | Tickets.ie (January 2019 - February 2021)
Tickets.ie develops ticketing solutions for the live event industry (biggest client of which is the GAA) that are used to sell millions of tickets each year. Their technology stack comprises mostly of ASP.NET MVC apps written in C#, with a SQL Server backend hosted on Azure and IIS, while the role itself was a mixture of support tasks, DevOps and light development work.
Key Responsibilities
- Administration of Azure and provisioning Azure resources using the portal and ARM templates.
- Being an active contributing member of a Scrum team by taking part in Standup's and Sprint reviews.
- Setup of Git repos and YAML deployment pipelines for Dev and Live environments using Azure DevOps.
- Monitoring Azure resources and alleviating downtime issues when high trafficked events go on sale.
Key Accomplishments
- Migration of numerous services/websites from VM's to Azure Web Apps for cost reduction purposes.
- Identifying bottlenecks in our infrastructure and codebase using Stackify (APM tool) and Azure Insights.
- Gained knowledge of micro-service architectures on a greenfield .NET Core project (for An Post) utilising Azure Service Bus and Azure Functions.
Education
Level 9 Masters (MSc) in DevOps Technological University Dublin
- (January 2023 - Present)
- Attending 18 month part-time 100% online course in DevOps to further my understanding of DevOps tooling and CI/CD processes.
Level 9 Postgraduate Diploma in Cloud Computing National College Of Ireland
- (Merit Awarded in November 2019)
- Attended part-time course (2 evening classes a week whilst working full-time), in order to further my understanding of enterprise cloud computing technologies.
Level 8 B.Sc (Honours) In Computing Dundalk Institute Of Technology
- (Merit Awarded in October 2014)
- 4 year Honours Bachelors in in Computer Science with a focus on web application technologies.
Certifications
Microsoft Certified: Azure Architect Expert (AZ-305) Intend to renew on a yearly basis.
Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400) Intend to renew on a yearly basis.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204) Intend to renew on a yearly basis.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate (AZ-500) Intend to renew on a yearly basis.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Network Engineer Associate (AZ-700) Intend to renew on a yearly basis.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) Intend to renew on a yearly basis.
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) No expiry date.
Personal Projects
RICHARDCOFFEY.COM (Founder/Developer)
- A personal blog to encourage my learning in the web development and DevOps fields. I have a Portfolio section on my blog, whereby you can demo and read the documentation for multiple web apps I developed, all of which are in ASP.NET CORE and hosted on Azure with their code repositories on GitHub. You can check out those apps in the portfolio section here: https://richardcoffey.com/portfolio/
This CV is a Azure Serverless Web App
As part of the Cloud Resume Challenge, I created
this CV web page as a completely serverless web solution running on Azure. This popular online challenge is
designed for Cloud Engineers to showcase their cloud skills in a practical way, as it incorporates many
different Azure services such as Azure Functions and CosmosDb, besides implementing a full CI/CD approach
with
automated testing and monitoring. This was an excellent mini-project that offers a real life demonstration
of my coding, Azure and DevOps skills. To read more about how I made this project, please read my blog post here on
the subject or click the image below (which is an architectural diagram of my finished solution).
