Summary
Derek Nicol is an experienced Advanced DevOps Engineer and backend developer based in Austin with 11 years in production engineering and a software career stretching back to early 2000s. He specializes in Python-powered APIs (FastAPI, Django) and cloud-native architectures on AWS (EC2, ECS/ECR, RDS, Lambda), combined with containerization (Docker, Swarm, Traefik) and systems work across MySQL, Redis and Mongo. Derek blends hands-on infrastructure provisioning and physical server installs with application-level API design, bringing both ops rigor and code-first thinking to delivery. His background includes leading engineering efforts for high-traffic e-commerce and edtech platforms, and he’s comfortable moving between languages (Python, Go, PHP) and environments (Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS, Hyper-V). Colleagues rely on him to transform legacy LAMP systems into modern, automated deployments while keeping services reliable at scale.
10 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Programming, Computer Programming at Self Taught
Bowie High School