Andrew Alness Email & Phone Number

I have recently left the GHost team to work on a new endeavor in hybrid CDN/P2P technology. I now work on the Akamai Client. It's everything from a basic download manager to an incredibly intelligent and effective p2p-utilizing client-side download delivery mechanism. This is really fun and exciting new work. We're one of the first teams to try to make p2p work in a truly useful, legitimate, and monetizable way. Now I need to actively support 4 platforms: XP, Vista, OSX, and Linux, which is cool because now I can get more hardware I don't need to pay for. I now hope to have my code handling closer to 75-80% of your software downloads. Don't worry, I won't let you down (nor spin the hell out of your CPU or suck too much of your RAM.)

I work on AkamaiGHost, which is the name of our reverse HTTP/HTTPS proxy server. It would be a gross understatement to label it simply as a caching server. It runs on somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 Linux machines world-wide. These guys handle roughly 2 million browser hits a second (in aggregate.) At any given time I think ~15-20% of web traffic goes through Ghost. You probably use it everyday and don't know it (as long as I don't screw up.)

Implemented really cool ideas that no one wanted to buy at the time. Most of my time was spent developing projects on my own. I implemented various streaming server proxies for RealMedia, Windows Media, and QuickTime. Worked on the back-end server for a Napster-like service. I also implemented a global traffic manager which involved implementing BGP from scratch in order to build a graph of internet topology as one server selection heuristic. I also recorded some really killer acapella rap tracks concerning various other employees' stolen lunches from the breakroom fridge.

Now defunct internet service provider. It beat delivering pizza. I was responsible for keeping the network up. I had to admin some Bay Annex boxes, some USR Total Control boxes, some Bay and Cisco routers, and a few Linux machines for email, DNS, and shell service. Installed POPs in the bathrooms of various video stores, jewelery stores, abandoned buildings, bowling alleys, Dairy Queens, etc. I also had to develop CGI applications for customers. They ranged from basic shopping carts to chat systems to specialized search engines.