Gigs

My professional work in the software industry over the years. There is a bit of time between jobs here and there where I was working non-technical jobs and spending a lot of time on personal projects working to develop the skills needed to work in the industry.

Cedexis / Citrix

Senior Engineer (Oct ‘17 - Current)

With a background doing telemetry in JavaScript from working at New Relic, I took an opportunity to work on a browser based RUM client and related infrastructure. What made this job particularly interesting to me was having telemetry data used for more than just alerting or performance analysis, it was fed into intelligent DNS server that used it to make routing decisions.

  • Redesigned and built Dynamic Content benchmarks to include a cryptographic signature, giving us the first verified measurement type, ensuring no caching happened that would invalidate the measurement.
  • Built out the canary deployment system for the RUM client, allowing us to roll our releases or experiments out in 3-5% increments. This enabled us to try out changes to benchmarks and fixes for particular browsers without risking our whole corpus of data.
  • Provided deep analysis of benchmarks before and after major changes like shifting from HTTP to HTTPS or changing which browser API is used to gather the data. Giving us confidence and ability to notify customers if they’ll see a step function in their data.

Sparkypants Studios

Senior Backend Enginer (Feb ‘16 - Jun ‘17)

I got an opportunity to work on a video game, which had always been a dream of mine. As backend engineers we built the systems that stored data, matchmaking, login, and provided C++ libraries for the client and game server engineers to use. We used a microservice architecture written in Node.js, Python, SQL, and C++. Heavily using RabbitMQ as our message bus and MySQL as our database.

  • Redesigned the matchmaking backend to enable a confirm step before creating the game, while refactoring all data collection from the database to be just in time instead of up front eliminating a large class of bugs and AFK users.
  • Built an automated deployment system for our staging environment, with fully automatic registration and decommissioning of game servers on top of systemd and ansible.
  • Built and designed a full consent friend system to systemically prevent abuse where possible.
  • Refactored a C++ wrapper around libcurl to standardize header parsing and error propagation, preventing accidentally ignored errors and making HTTP access code easier to write.

New Relic

Node.js Agent Engineer (Apr ‘14 - Feb ‘16)

My first full time gig working in Node.js, and it was an amazing experience. I was able to connect with so much of the Node.js community via my work for New Relic. The Node.js Agent is the library New Relic customers install in their Node.js applications which monitors it and sends data back to New Relic servers for analysis.

  • Maintained a weekly release cadence for over 52 weeks in a row. Allowing the agent to respond quickly to the needs of our users.
  • Ran a series of support training session giving our support engineers much deeper understanding of how Node and our agent works. Resulting is a large reduction in support escalations.
  • Learned about the deep internals of Node.js and v8 in order to make our agent more accurate and performant.
  • Wrote and designed systems that accounted for as many error cases as possible because an error in the agent could crash a user’s system.

Contracting

Web Developer (Oct ‘13 - Apr ‘14)

I took on a few small contracts in this time, mostly though I spent my time learning to be a better Node.js engineer as I wanted to take my career toward more asynchronous programming.

Mozilla

Web Developer (May ‘12 - Sept ‘13)

This was my first time working in truly high scale development, both in traffic and in team size. It was also my first gig working with a purely remote team distributed across many time zones.

  • Started out working on addons.mozilla.org, reworking the use of Redis as a part of the caching solution.
  • Worked on security critical sections of the site including the blocklist that Firefox uses to shut down bad addons and extensions in the wild.
  • Was moved over to working on marketplace.firefox.com as part of the payments team.
  • Integrated with multiple payment providers and built the security pin portion of the site.
  • Was involved in many of the architecture choices such as revamping deployment, moving to smaller services, and caching.

Aquameta

Senior Software Developer (Mar ‘10 - Feb ‘12)

I loved this company and learned a great deal while I was working there. It is where I cut my teeth on Django apps that needed more than just some more hardware thrown at them to scale.

  • Was part of a team that implemented, maintained, and extended a large Django application that powered 3 sites.
  • Scaled that application using celery for offloading and generous amounts of caching.
  • Upgraded Django between major versions twice. From 1.1 to 1.2 and from 1.2 to 1.3.
  • Wrote and encouraged the writing of both unit tests and functional tests.
  • Wrote and maintained one click deployment scripts using Fabric.
  • Interfaced with the clients regularly to gather requirements for features.
  • Guided the architecture of the application using community best practices and past experience.

Parthenon Software

Software Developer (Sept ‘09 - Nov ‘09)

This was a PHP shop I worked at for a short while. I did development on a well established code base.

  • Updated unit tests, allowing for more confidence that application was correct.
  • Met with clients to discuss and advise on what course to take for re-designing their software.
  • Implemented feature requests, fixing existing bugs in the module while adding the feature, resulting in cleaner, better documented code.
  • Participated in “brainstorming” sessions concerning design/testing details for various project.

Critical Path Software

QA Tester (May ‘08 - Aug ‘08)

Here I worked in the QA department testing software and hardware. The primary project I was hired for were 2 lines of computers that a company was going to release and they wanted some independent stress testing done in a wide range of activities. Online gaming, word processing, downloading content, watching HD video both streaming and off a Blu-Ray.

  • Learned to write very effective bug reports.
  • Wrote and executed test plans, tracking progress and reporting defects.
  • Worked with a team to decide on software milestones and requirements.
  • Set up many different hardware/software configurations for testing.
  • Wrote a tool using C++ to generate data for testing.
  • Assist in delegation of various portions of testing to help train new members of the team prior to product release.

Transim Technology

Intern Software Developer (Dec ‘05 - Aug ‘06)

This was my first foray into the world of software development at a company. The stack was a large java backend with a PHP layer on top with liberal use of Perl as glue.

  • Cleaned up and maintained several in-house tools written in Perl, Java, and PHP for processing and displaying circuit schematics.
  • Created a GUI for two of the in-house tools so that non-technical staff could assist in processing schematics that needed human interaction.
  • Implemented a secure login system with detailed permission setup.
  • Documented all of the above mentioned work, along with a large portion of a Java based webserver back-end.

I had a great time at this job and this, on top of my passion I already had, really sealed the deal as far as my desire to pursue software development as my career.