Director
Being a good director is not just about leadership, it's about fostering participation and creativity in others. Whether I'm providing the technical insight for an organizational initiative, projecting strategies and deadlines, starting our team on a project iteration, or just giving advice, I approach the challenge with empathy, imagination, and fortitude—and without buzzwords whenever possible.
Engineer
Problem solving is my passion and software is my favorite Swiss army
hammer. What began as childhood curiosity has evolved into
a 12-year professional career of building large-scale web
applications, custom frameworks, data pipelines, and APIs. I love
working in agile teams because there is great power in
collaboration and I prefer open source because { innovation.should > capital }
Systems
In the good old days I racked routers, configured subnets, and built RAID-backed database behemoths. Over the past 5 years—the better days—I have been managing a medium-sized and heavily scaled infrastructure on AWS, using tools like Puppet and my very own Aether shell.
Current Position
Technical Director/Lead Engineer
National Novel Writing Month
Since
As Technical Director at NaNoWriMo, I work within our executive, programmatic, and distributed engineering teams to build and run the largest free online writing event for 400,000+ children, teens, and adults annually.
- Helped to increase community engagement and fundraising through successful technology strategies
- Architected and built a new event-site application using Ruby on Rails and achieved
- An 80% decrease in overall load per request compared to the previous Drupal-based site
- Greater participant engagement through community-focused UX
- Application stability through TDD and good object-oriented design
- Implemented responsive UI for better mobile support using Twitter's Bootstrap and our own distinctive style
- Implemented common Filaments Rails engine to reduce code redundancy over multiple event sites
- Kick-started an initiative to open source our event-site framework and bring our tech-savvy participants into the fold as facilitators of their own NaNoWriMo experience
- Released reusable application components as open-source Ruby gems, most notably
- Implemented the virtual classroom component of our Young Writers Program that led to
- Thousands of empowered educators able to better measure their students' performance
- Tens of thousands of engaged students communicating in more focused classroom discussions
- Instituted an agile development model that led to
- Better application interfaces through continuous feedback
- Higher confidence in deadlines and fundraising promises
- Stable and predictable application deployments
- Established a beta-testing program to improve QA coverage and gain early feedback on new site features
- Implemented Aether, a Ruby framework and shell for easy bootstrapping of AWS infrastructure
- Established and maintained a highly scalable Debian infrastructure using AWS, custom AMIs, and Puppet
- Responded to emergency events, diagnosing and solving a wide variety of infrastructure problems under heavy load
- Achieved 100% uptime during our peak seasons when our cultural ritual of "self Slashdot-ing" used to be commonplace
- Established a stress-testing environment that enabled us to identify and fix performance bottlenecks
- Implemented a plugin for Amanda that integrates LVM snapshots for more consistent backups
Technology Experience
- Strategic Planning 7yr
- Project Management 7yr
- Agile Methodologies 4yr
- PHP 10yr
- Drupal 5yr
- Perl 2yr
- C# 2yr
- Scala 1yr
- TDD 5yr
- Responsive Design 1yr
- Ruby 7yr
- Rails 5yr
- HTML/CSS 10yr
- HTML5/CSS3 1yr
- JavaScript 8yr
- jQuery 5yr
- Prototype 7yr
- Git 6yr
- RESTful API Design 6yr
- AWS 4yr
- Puppet 2yr
- MySQL DBA 8yr
- PostgreSQL DBA 2yr
- Nginx 3yr
- Varnish 3yr
- Apache 9yr
- Postfix 8yr
Past Professional Experience
Lead Software Engineer
eQuest
–
As Lead Engineer at eQuest, I directed a team of brilliant engineers in developing—from framework to user interface—a web-based job distribution application that serves several hundred companies internationally.
- Defined project requirements and deadlines
- Led a team of in-house and remote engineers in designing and implementing a PHP-based job distribution application
- Designed and implemented a custom MVC framework in PHP, including:
- Database abstraction layer with datatype mapping and transactional replay
- ORM implementation with object caching
- SOAP interfaces for decoupled inter-component communication
- Implemented a highly parallel job delivery pipeline that:
- Translates native job postings into hundreds of different target formats and taxonomies
- Publishes postings to over 300 different job boards using a large variety of APIs
- Maintained a stable Debian Linux infrastructure, often surpassing required 99.99% availability
Network Systems Administrator
Silicon Valley College
–
As Network Systems Administrator at Silicon Valley College, I architected and administered a large heterogeneous network across multiple administrative offices and campuses.
- Supported 30+ administrative users in a primarily Windows 2000 environment
- Supported 200+ heterogeneous classrooms systems including installations of Windows 9x and 2000, various Linux distributions, and Mac OS 9
- Established stable and cost-effective VPN infrastructure for remote locations using IPsec on OpenBSD
- Led a 6-week introductory course on GNU/Linux system administration
- Led a 6-week Applied Projects course on integration of networking technologies:
- Subnets and routing protocols on Cisco routers with IOS
- VPNs using various protocols on Windows 2000, Linux, and OpenBSD
- Windows 2000 domain administration
- Integration of Linux into Windows domains
Education
Diablo Valley College and Peralta Colleges
–
Earned 61 credits towards 4-year Cultural Anthropology BA program—sustained a 3.8 GPA
Silicon Valley College
Graduated
Earned CCNA and MCSE+i certifications
Interests + Passions
- Semantic Web and Hypermedia
- Indie Games and Interactive Storytelling
- Cultural Anthropology
- Politics and Social Justice
- Wilderness Backpacking and Travel
- Sailing