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.

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 timezones.

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 independant 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.