Ben Drees Email & Phone Number

Oakland, CA, US

Helped migrate planning and trafficking components of $1 Billion ads business from Google to AdsWizz, an acquired subsidiary, without hiccups.

Sydney, NSW, AU

Worked on features for Statuspage - a service for communicating with customers about planned and unplanned downtime. Ruby, Rails, Javascript, React, MySQL, email, SMS.

Led design and development of version two of the company's core technical asset, a stream-oriented classifier engine. Replaced Ruby/Redis with Java/Kafka. Increased throughput 100x. Created a cross-validation framework and system for tracking and visualizing classifier effectiveness over time. Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, JavaScript, Redis, MySQL, Python, Kafka.

Helped develop legal discovery and advertising applications and maintain an underlying Bayesian classifier engine handling emails and tweets. Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Redis, MySQL, Python, Kafka, Zookeeper, AWS, Salt, Hadoop.

Mountain View, CA, US

Helped port freebase.com to Google infrastructure. Provided oncall support for Freebase and Google Knowledge Graph. Implemented insert, update, and delete operations of a next-generation graph database.

US

Owned HTTP caching and distributed logging/monitoring systems. Served as resident expert in HTTP, caching, distributed performance analysis and fault diagnosis. Metaweb was acquired by Google in July, 2010. Python, C, Python + C, Squid hacking, Apache tuning, WSGI, MySQL, JavaScript, load balancing and content switching, Hadoop.

Managed a small team of developers implementing prototypes of intelligence analysis tools for government and defense industry clients. Spent my final nine months in this role building the first usable version of the system that became Freebase, which was spun off as a new company, Metaweb Technologies, Inc., in 2005. Java, XML, XML Schema, XSLT, RDF, RDF.

Led design and development of an XSLT-based courseware compiler. XSLT, Java.

Helped develop a web site publishing engine. C++, XML.

Helped deliver the web front end of version one of a system that enabled kids to use their parents' credit cards online, with contraints. Java, Oracle.

US

Helped develop outSPOKEN, the first screen reader for Windows, and the GUI Access Toolkit, the first Accessibility API. Served as lead client engineer on an Internet port of "You Don't Know Jack", a popular CDROM-based trivia game. C++, Windows hacking, cross-platform discipline, HTTP, TCP/IP, Apache, SQL, functional and technical design, technical project.

San Diego, California, US

Developed desktop publishing applications for DOS and Windows.

Developed telephony applications for DOS.