Most of my recent work experience has been in large multi-tier application design and implementation. This has included my implementations of custom database connection pooling, object storage, thread pooling, transparent and explicit caching, a custom database abstraction language, and an application-specific authentication, authorization, and mandatory access-control mechanism, among many other things.

My operations background has left me much more sensitive to deployment details that many other engineers seem to overlook. I feel that deployment details including monitoring, debugging, and granular configuration are as fundamental to large systems as implementation details.

Programming/scripting in C, Objective-C, Perl, Tcl, Java, AspectJ, Javascript (AJAX and other advanced interaction techniques), Python, Eiffel, Erlang, OCaml, Scheme (and other Lisp-derived languages), JSP, Pascal, Bourne Shell, and C Shell. IP socket programming in C/ObjC/C++, Python, Perl, tcl, and Java. SSL programming using OpenSSL in C and JSSE in Java. Servlets and EJB in Java. Necessary software modification including storage and authentication systems for cyrus, backend proxy authentication for Livingston's radius daemon, LDAP based key distribution system for ssh servers, parallelizing Bourne shell for faster system management, etc... Experience with various document translation technology such as htmldoc, LaTeX, XSLT for dynamic translation of XML documents. XML DTD design. DOM and SAX parsing and document generation. Using JavaCC to create parsers for domain specific languages.

UNIX administration under BSDI, FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1 (Digital Unix), and Irix. Including, but not limited to, installation and/or configuration and maintenance of the following network servers: ftpd, innd, httpd (Apache, Weblogic, NCSA, Netscape, thttpd, jetty, resin, and my own), gated, zebra, named, Netscape mail, NIS, NFS, sendmail, postfix, cyrus, ssh, qmail, smail, tcpd (wrappers), uucp, ipf, ipnat, Kerberos v5, Netscape Directory Server, OpenLDAP, AFS, etc... Certificate management using OpenSSL. Kame IPSEC and IPv6.

Installation and configuration of cisco (IOS 9.x-12.x) routers, PIX firewall, and cisco LocalDirector. Also installation and configuration of other miscellaneous network hardware including F5 BigIP, Alteon switches, Morning Star routers and Livingston Portmaster and Ascend terminal servers, etc...

Couchbase, Inc. - Mountain View, CA January 2009 - Present Cofounder / Chief Architect

Built the core engine of membase and lots of surrounding tools.

Caring.com - San Mateo, CA October 2007 - December 2008 Software Engineer

[need to write more] Job processing, development environments, hg → git, search stuff, feed stuff, etc..

Teneros - Mountain View, CA August 2006 - October 2007 Software Engineer

Replaced a build and deployment system made up of custom ant scripts and an embedded servlet container in favor of a maven-driven standard full-project build deployable in any standard servlet container. As part of this project, increased the test coverage from zero to as close to 100% as possible without introducing dramatic changes to the way the code worked (mostly limitations of DB access methodology). This included building new test technology to test code that was otherwise untestable.

In a forward-looking architecture, I created new data access mechanisms and an abstract query language allowing somewhat complex queries to be issued without regard to access technologies making it possible to issue queries over objects stored in LDAP, JDBC, in-memory structures, hibernate and potentially more using the same query while maximizing code reuse and consistency.

I also developed a set of UI widgets that formed the foundation of a lot of our information display using Google Web Toolkit and later zk. All information displays are realtime using a GC-safe pubsub mechanism with very granular subscriptions. The change tracking is built using aspectj to record the previous and new value for every property change on every entity automatically.

2wire - San Jose, CA May 2002 - August 2006 Technical Lead

Designed and implemented network management software to scale from under 200,000 transactions per-day averaging around 6 seconds to transaction to a pretty steady transaction time of just under a second (mostly network time) moving up to about 500,000 transactions on the same hardware. The software scales horizontally which has allowed us to scale to roughly 3,000,000 transactions per day by expanding the cluster to about 24 machines (although the same load was tested on a single machine). While scaling, the software continued to increase in complexity by adding support for additional management protocols (TR-069 and SNMP), additional databases (Oracle, Postgresql), and additional access interfaces (Web 2.0 UI, SOAP, XML-RPC).

Built an abstract TR-069 interface based on dynamically reconfigurable state machines allowing for database-driven workflows configurable per transaction type per group via a drag-and-drop browser-based interface. On top of this is an API that presents a set of simple request/response methods that synchronize multiple asynchronous events that may be occurring on multiple machines within a cluster. Synchronization and data transfer occurs using a custom multicast messaging system that allows short-lived temporary subscribers to receive compressed objects to be delivered in multiple segments which may arrive in any arbitrary order.

Sr. Java/Unix Server Engineer

Worked on a team of engineers designing and implementing custom server-side java software including custom protocols between java application servers and embedded systems. In addition to architectural duties, also helped refine coding standards and develop software testing frameworks.

Beyond.com - Santa Clara, CA March 1998 - May 2002 Senior Systems Architect

Worked on a small team as an application architect designing and implementing a new order and content management system from the ground up. We comfortably produced and managed 200,000 lines of code for this project in about nine months while maintaining a clean design.

Performance Engineer

Was responsible for developing or finding and evaluating advanced technologies that aid in performance, availability, reliability, and scalability for both operations and engineering. Evaluations included everything from search engines (where we ended up implementing a custom engine I designed) to load balancing hardware and software.

Senior Systems Administrator

Analyzed various performance, scaling and security problems, made recommendations to solve the problems, and worked on implementations of solutions. Beyond.com went from a small e-commerce web site with a single web server, to a growing site with three servers, to the most popular site to buy software with n application servers balancing various tasks, and serving over 7M hits/day. Created scalability plans, both for site scalability and scalability of maintenance, developed monitoring procedures and systems, and worked on reducing points of failure to ensure 24/7 availability of all public systems. Was also called in whenever engineers had architecture, design or implementation problems. Beyond.com consistently maintained a higher functional uptime than any of our competitors and many other popular sites based on statistics gathered from third-party site monitoring.

Taos Mountain Software - Santa Clara, CA May 1997 - March 1998 Systems Administrator

Consultant for all aspects of UNIX and network administration. Placed at Cybersource Corporation the entire time. Created and implemented plans to increase network availability, application and site specific monitoring, introduction of a revision control system and a scalable method of code release, among many other things.

IPA - Fort Smith, AR March 1996 - May 1997 Systems Administrator

Network design, monitoring, and maintenance. Implemented and maintained mail server, news server, various web server machines, accounting and billing. Migrated from a few small sites with static routing to several POPs in multiple states with an OSPF routed backbone. Created network integration plans and implementation after acquisitions, including doing very short-term integration of my global management system, replicating and consolidating authentication data, and providing a migration path to assimilate the remaining processes and redistribute the resources.