• Production Engineer, Yahoo! Inc. (Mar. 2009 - Present)
• Senior member of a small, global team tasked with managing many thousands of servers for a high-traffic advertising property.
• Designed and implemented a Perl framework to simplify the creation of reliable and consistent automation tools. Built dozens of simple and mildly complex tools using this framework.
• Helped overhaul the global software deployment process, reducing the number of manhours required per-release by over 90%.
• Greatly simplified the existing monitoring and alerting framework, resulting in the elimination of hundreds of instances of duplicate code.
• Participated in a 12×7 on-call rotation.
• Mentored junior team members, with a focus on enabling them to perform production-related tasks within weeks of starting.
• Lead Developer, Undisclosed Web Startup (Sep. 2008 - Feb. 2009)
• Migrated a typical LAMP-based application from a shared hosting provider into the AWS cloud.
• Tuned LAMP stack and custom PHP code, reducing average page service time by 75%.
• Created analytics tools and used them to provide content recommendations for SEO purposes.
• Developed various private MediaWiki extensions.
• Site Architect / Operations Manager, DailyStrength (March 2008 - July 2008)
• Designed and implemented a variety of individual site components, including session management and authentication, friend/community activity lists, generalized content/media storage, email templating and management, and search.
• Assisted product management team with feature design and project/dev team scheduling.
• Worked with other developers to create consistent interfaces within the codebase to ease the development process.
• Mentored and collaborated with a small team of developers on a variety of topics ranging from frontend design to QA, release management, and internal/member care tools.
• Created an application development framework to assist in the rapid reworking of legacy site features, in order to address design consistency, performance, and maintainability issues.
• Site Operations Manager, DailyStrength (May 2007 - Feb 2008)
• Researched colo facilities and network providers, negotiated contracts, and turned up a cabinet in a top tier datacenter with transit and CDN service.
• Specified, sourced, configured, and deployed a redundant collection of high end commodity servers to act as firewalls, web servers, and database servers.
• Contributed numerous SQL and PHP performance improvements to the site codebase, including memcache integration.
• Tuned Apache, PHP, and MySQL to reduce system load by over 80% while sustaining constant week-to-week traffic increases.
• Deployed comprehensive monitoring and metric gathering tools, and used them to analyze and predict site performance issues and user behavior.
• Used open source tools such as perlbal, pf, and heartbeat to create a scalable, highly available web application platform.
• Leveraged Xen and VLANs to create a secured, tiered network with logical separation of various secondary services.
• Freelance Consultant (Dec. 2006 - Mar. 2007)
• Developed extensive editorial oversight and publishing workflow tools based on MediaWiki, with a focus on integration with the MediaWiki extension model.
• Tuned metadata and site behavior to provide a cleaner and more user-friendly presentation of data to search engines.
• Created a full featured search engine, leveraging existing open source tools.
• Analyzed site traffic data (in both raw format and via Google Analytics) to provide site administrators with valuable content suggestions.
• Extended C-based chat server software.
• Assisted organizations with system administrator recruiting efforts.
• Vice President of Engineering, ManyOne Networks, Inc. (Feb. 2006 - Dec. 2006)
• Manager of Network Operations, ManyOne Networks, Inc. (Aug. 2005 - Jan. 2006)
• Senior Unix Administrator, ManyOne Networks, Inc. (Aug. 2004 - Aug. 2005)
• Assumed project management and co-architect responsibility for a custom web 2.0 application.
• Managed a small team of system administrators and tool developers handling daily operations of production site and corporate IT.
• Assisted software development team with performance, security, and functionality issues.
• Implemented and maintained Asterisk-based corporate VoIP solution.
• Implemented site wide monitoring and metric gathering using Nagios, Cacti, and other open source tools.
• Unix Administrator, Colonize.com, Inc. (2002-2004)
• Implemented a site-wide network monitoring system using open source tools.
• Implemented a normalized database schema for existing data, cutting the active data set size from 50GB to 15GB and significantly improving query performance.
• Developed a wide variety of data analysis tools for management, providing them with a large amount of previously unavailable information about business operations.
• Handled daily system administration tasks for a farm of 50 web, mail, and database servers, including during off-hours.
• Freelance Consultant (2001 - 2002)
• Provided remote and onsite UNIX system administration services to a number of clients, ranging from startups to large multinational firms.
• Senior Unix Administrator, Escalate, Inc. (1999 - 2001)
• Specified, acquired, installed, and maintained dozens of Enterprise-class Sun and Intel Solaris-based servers and associated peripherals.
• Assisted in development of initial SAN framework, and ultimately assumed complete responsibility for the growth and maintenance of three SANs based on products from Brocade, EMC/Clariion, and Emulex.
• Developed a configuration management system to simplify deployment and administration of large numbers of UNIX servers.
• Implemented a robust network and system monitoring infrastructure.
• Mentored two junior staff members to help them rapidly assume greater responsibilities and skill sets.
• Developed and maintained an extensive set of small and mid-sized tools for IT groups and others, primarily using Perl.
• Helped to provide 24/7 availability in a high stress production Internet environment. Participated in on-call rotation.
• Senior Consultant, NetDesign (1999)
• Participated in the design of a cluster of Linux machines and a NetApp for use as a massive Internet media pump, including network design, a network boot/configuration management system, and a full historical bandwidth/load graphing system.
• Participated in the construction and field installation of eight of the above systems. Total project time from design start to the last installation was approximately six weeks, involving four full time consultants.
• Senior Consultant, Collective Technologies (1998 - 1999)
• Worked on an operations team managing tens of thousands of UNIX workstations and servers.
• Traveled all over the country, often on short notice, to meet diverse client needs.
• SA Consultant, Taos Mountain (1996 - 1998)
• Information Security Intern, Intel Corporation (1996)
• System Administrator, SkyNET Inc. (1996)
• I.S. Manager, Finger Lakes Engineering (1991 - 1995)

Education

• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1995 - 1996)
• Completed sophomore year in Computer Science department.
• Corning Community College (1992 - 1995)
• Computer Science and Math Emphasis