I am a technical leader for advanced web-based and distributed systems with deep experience in devops, application definition, workflow, personalization, data storage, scaling, and content management across various enterprise development platforms and languages. I pride myself on my ability to straddle the business/technical fence and ensure that the requirements of all parties are met. As a full-stack technical architect, I have managed and lead teams in a wide variety of specialties including base-level machine configuration, backend development, and usability and application flows. I have nurtured many projects from inception to full implementation and deployment.
I have the ability to quickly assess and learn unfamiliar systems and to analyze, scope, and establish technical and business requirements for projects. I have proven success with managing teams of developers through on-time and exposure-managed project completion. I have had repeated successes with constructing highly usable tools that fit actual needs and remain in production for years after implementation.
I am an accomplished and passionate semi-amateur photographer and chef, and I will make you laugh from time to time. If you were here now, this might be where I would give you some food I made or tell you a joke.
Master of Science (Computer Science), Columbia University, SEAS, 1997
Bachelor of Arts, Columbia University, Columbia College, 1996
Created from scratch and managed the complete product infrastructure on AWS with an emphasis on disposable instances, no single point of failure, blue/green deployments, and centralized log aggregation. Spearheaded the company’s adoption of Terraform and Ansible, replacing manually provisioned instances. Successfully launched a major revision to the product infrastructure, switching from Rails/PostgreSQL to Erlang/Riak. Reworked developer workflows and implemented git-flow for increased developer productivity and communication.
Architected, oversaw design, and implemented back-end of the company’s flagship data visualization application for browsing and interacting with both our custom data sets and twitter data. Led development on a large-scale data processing pipeline backend to scalably ingest and analyze millions of tweets per day. Responsible for overseeing all day-to-day operations and code development. Oversaw and participated in development of several iterations of our standalone API.
Performed database architecture, scalability analysis, and query optimization for several projects for Yahoo’s Advanced Products Group., including Kickstart, a social network for graduating students. Designed and implemented a MySQL architecture for high availability and cross-colo encrypted replication, tuned SQL queries for high performance, and drafted and implemented failover and backup procedures.
Founded Street 86 Systems, Inc. to provide project management, technical analysis, and optimization services to enterprise customers. Professional Services include but are not limited to technical leadership, project scoping and design, technical architecture, performance assessment / optimization, custom development, and digital photography. Responsible for managing all aspects of day-to-day business including P&L/accounting, contracts and negotiations, and IT and hosting services. Projects have included large-scale data migrations, an efficient high volume email parsing engine, e-commerce application development, distributed content management system development, database optimization, and cryptographic purchase verification for clients such as WeShop, A Small World, Rainbow Media, eMusic, GOOD Magazine, Design 21 SDN, Area 17, ourmedia.org, Broadband Mechanics, and the America Civil Liberties Union.
Founded and led development of a social networking and research portal serving the conference industry. Architected the site, led development team, and coordinated with businesspeople to refine and specify functionality for the site. Went from concept to launch in 6 months with no outside investment and an entirely part-time team. Remained active in an advisory role after launch.
Responsible for managing the technical development organization, overseeing all development projects, directly supervising the development team, managing client relationships, performing technical architecture for existing and new clients, and developing product offering strategies. Projects included:
Led all aspects of development for atkins.com, working closely with client technical staff. Defined and spearheaded new development projects including deployment of UK and AU versions of the site. Architected and led transition from a 10-server Apache/Linux/MySQL cluster to a 50-server fault tolerant cluster, modifying application structures and session passing mechanisms to allow nodes to be disposable. Architected and developed a summary datapoint reporting application for daily use by upper management (later productized for other clients). Performed extensive analysis of database and system response times with custom realtime diagnostic tools, and designed optimizations to address performance bottlenecks, increasing database capacity fourfold.
Architected and participated in development for custom Zope-based editorial and administrative site interfaces, workflow engineering, and multi-staged publishing mechanisms for soros.org and tascorp.org. Assisted with architectures to support distributed hierarchical publishing models to allow sub-organizations (Initiatives) control over individual content sections while maintaining a coherent user experience across the entire site. Developed administrative interface specifications and collaborative interlocking workflow specifications and implementations.
As the second New York employee, helped grow the company from under 30 to just over 200 employees over five years while maintaining technical quality. In addition to on-going client engagements, participated actively in internal training, technical presentations, methodology workshops, and technical skills assessment frameworks. Worked on 3-9 month Vignette and other content management projects for clients including John Wiley & Sons, iWon.com, Earthweb, the National Cancer Institute, Bertelsmann, and Prentice Hall.
Served on the Board of Directors of the non-profit pre-school affiliated with Columbia University. Responsibilities included staff, parent, and director correspondence; documentation and by-law review; and fund-raising.
Served on the Board of Directors of the non-profit alumni organization affiliated with The Philolexian Society of Columbia University. Responsibilities included alumni and director correspondence. Served as Treasurer for several terms.
I have spent a significant amount of time building systems related to or using the following technologies. I’m either currently able to carry on development with them or could be again on very short notice.
Apache; nginx, LAMP; Ruby on Rails
MySQL/MariaDB; PostgreSQL; MongoDB; Redis; Elasticsearch, Solr
Linux (Redhat / Fedora / Ubuntu / Debian / Gentoo); Solaris/SunOS; FreeBSD; OS X; Windows
PHP; Ruby/Ruby on Rails; Python, Perl; TCL
Ansible; Terraform; AWS/EC2; ELK
Devops, Workflow, Requirements Assessment, XML, JSON, Scalable Web Architectures, Server-side Cache Management and Design, Message Queue Servers and Architecture, Authentication & Security, Web Crawling and Parsing, Web Personalization, Usability/Information Architecture; Digital Imaging/Photography; TCP/IP Networking; Technical UI Design; MVC Architecture, Testing Methodologies and Frameworks (TDD/BDD)