Summary & Purpose

Hi, my name is Nathan Benton (or just Nate). I'll forgo explaining why I named this domain  and instead provide a summarized professional timeline. 

Right now, I'm working as an Infrastructural Engineer at COX Communications. Before this, I was referred to as a Universal Engineer, that specific title and corresponding work began at Slower.ai (no, you're not going to find much about them online or elsewhere, at least at time of publishing this😄). Before my short-term contract with Slower.ai, I assumed a Cloud Data Engineer and Solution Architect hybrid position at a leading BaaS platform provider - Slalom_Build (a branch of Slalom). Before then, I worked strictly a Data Engineer at both Optum (a branch of UnitedHealth Group) and Sourcewater, Inc. In other areas of work, I've provided teaching services, both part- and full-time Seismic Geophysical and Data Engineer consulting at ARM Geophysics (a branch of ARM Group) as well as research advisement for process automation and near-surface geophysical imaging projects.  This site presents some information about myself, services, past/current research, links to code repositories, as well as my interests and expertise as they relate to what I  continue to learn about and apply as a student and working professional.

I attended Baylor University (Waco, TX) and earned a Bachelor of Science, which included both a major in Geophysics and a Mathematics minor. Thereafter, I earned a  Master of Science in Geophysics with a specialization in near-surface seismic reflection data processing and inversion from Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA)  - in case you're interested, the title of my thesis is located here. I say title because you can't access or download the document until March, 21, 2025. To mitigate this potential problem, I've uploaded a self-hosted link to the document below.

The content here links to similar information on other sites. Whether you are navigating to my LinkedIn, GitHub, or StackExchange account, you'll locate easy-to-find material that binds everything together in a congruent, user-friendly manner.

I specialize in what I like to refer very, very generally as data handling, architectural provisioning, and software configuration. OK, what does all that mean? In terms of the architecture and software components, those refer to the creation, management, and configuration of host systems. For example, a few EC2s need to be created (and then managed) and then those same VMs need software installed and configured. This can be accomplished via Terraform and Ansible. Of course, there are multiple ways to do this. Now, for the data handling part, consider these host systems "ready" for tasks such as ingestion, processing, storage, and/or transfer. Perhaps tools such as NiFi and Airflow are the orchestration systems that are calling other (external) parts of the data handling workflow like Lambda, S3, Glue, EMR, RDS, etc.

All this is to say: I enjoy learning and using a variety of tools that range (in conventional job roles/titles) from Developer, to Solutions Architect, and finally to Data Engineer. Ultimately, my focus is to identify and solve problems efficiently by leveraging a holistic (or universal) "tech stack" rather than one that's a function of a myopic job role and the tools/sources that correspond to it.

1]  Automated architectural provisioning (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi via TypeScript, ...) 

2]  Automated software configuration (e.g. Ansible)

3]  Baseline CI operations (e.g. GitLab, ADO)

4]  Data-lake and data-warehouse setup and integration

5]   Web-scraping

6]   Cloud environments: AWS (EC2, RDS, Lambda, Glue, IAM, VPC, & S3) and DigitalOcean

7]   IoT (e.g. Raspberry Pi systems)

In the past, my work mainly involved geophysical work, so I'll list them here just to be thorough:

1]   Near-surface seismic reflection data acquisition & processing (SH/SV- & P-wave)

2]   Post-stack seismic inversion methods & AVO analyses

3]   Well-log (EC, gamma, sonic, & shear) analysis

4] Rock physics

5] 2/3-D ER surveying & inversion

6] MASW for Rayleigh-, Love-, Lamb-, & Scholte-waves

Please, feel free to contact me (for whatever reason) at any time via the info listed below.