Alan Tai Email & Phone Number

I love coding and have been doing it for what feels like an eternity in too many languages to count. Started writing games in Applesoft BASIC in 1982, and won a high school programming competition in Pascal in 1989. During college in the early 90's, I taught myself C++ and Linux back when they were the cool and new thing. During internships at NASA, I did computational research in Fortran on optical fiber efficiency and wrote a visualization system in IDL for LIDAR climate data from the space shuttle Atlantis.Also, I'm proud to have been a part of the early history of the Internet at AOL. Anyone remember AOL Keywords or the Member Directory social network? Yes, I was lead engineer on those. Yeah, I know those seem so ancient (and a bit uncool now), but at the time, it felt so awesome to see your products featured on 60 Minutes. I spent most of 2006 writing ETL jobs in Ruby. On several search projects like audio/video, we used SOLR/Lucene. In others like search autocomplete, I used Hadoop. In 2007, I created a mobile search engine as a pet project, evangelized it, and it ended up being productized. Had a great time leading the creation of the iPhone search web-app just a year later. Worked at Expedia for 9 years on business rules engines and migrating the hotel booking system to microservices and the cloud. Managed teams at Nordstrom on Order Management system and Tableau on Account Entitlements. Am currently at Google Cloud working on Control Plane.I'm a big proponent of Spring IoC and SCRUM have been using both of those consistently since 2006. Over the many years of doing design, I find that I follow Robert Martin's principles of Clean Code. Modules that are elegantly and cleanly designed are easier to maintain and have fewer bugs. I'm a fan of continuous development and letting the software evolve. In my day to day coding, I use a micro-Agile process. I actually plan out an entire working feature or bug fix--file by file and method by method--before actually writing a single line of code. I find it lets me catch design or logic errors early on and really requires that tasks be fully groomed and designed out. As they say, "Failing to plan is planning to fail..."

Listed skills include Web Services, Mobile Applications, Java, Javascript, and 12 others.