David Berkman Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Forio wants to transform the latest iteration of their platform into the system they’ve envisioned and gain control over their software process, making it possible to accurately predict resources and schedules, and to plan projects predictably over months and quarters. To that end I initiated a team oriented agile methodology, extended their task/ticket tracking system to smoothly integrate with this new process, introduced a stable iteration, burn-down charts, epics, story points, and velocity tracking. Brought product development into a central role within engineering to act on behalf of the customer. Instituted a behavior driven development framework for QA automation. Re-tooled the deployment cycle to handle continuous deployment, pulling release/update times to under 20 minutes. Re-envisioned the platform architecture on a limited number of robust cluster ready components. Translated all services into idempotent units talking over an SOA backbone. Re-wrote the external language interfaces on a clean thread-safe NIO-based stack. Started a wiki-based architectural documentation project. Begun weekly engineering demos of all new functionality, and instigated quarterly milestones to track long-term progress.

Sf, Ca, Us

Helping ImpactLabs create a software driven portfolio management/re-balancing system. Our initial target is an alpha product that can create personalized index-tracking portfolios, with loss harvesting capabilities, that express each client's passions and views. That is to say accounts with high social impact, but fully diversified, holding individual securities in order to maximize the loss harvesting effects. Clients will be able to choose such portfolios online, dialing in their social preferences, and seeing the results in real time. The re-balancing engine will be able to provide the reasoning behind its decisions, including the news items and third-party ratings which align the stock choices with the client's expressed preferences. All of this with hands-off back-testing driven solely by the production software's heuristics.

San Mateo, California, Us

Although the Icix business model has been proven, and, after years in the field, is starting to gain the recognition it deserves, the applications backing Icix services had been built upon less stable foundations. The company is looking to completely modernize its technology stack, modularize its code base, and provide self-service automation wherever possible, without interrupting ongoing business operations. To that end, I was hired to architect the conversion from a purely ASP and C# based Microsoft engine, with most business logic trapped within complex stored procedures, to a modern services-based approach in Java, with a pure Javascript front-end, and a modest supporting Node translation layer. Business logic is to be converted to a rules engine and business workflow components in Drools and the Activiti BPMN Engine. Complete service interoperability between language stacks will be provided by a service bus mediated custom IDL protocol, allowing old technologies to make use of new services, and new technologies to leverage old code whilst in-transition. I have been involved in the architectural underpinnings of all new operations, the hiring and mentoring of staff, the building of internal frameworks and APIs, the extension of the build and deployment system, the writing of documentation, and an active participant in the formation of a company-wide agile process. After several months with the company, I was placed in charge of the group engaged in the new platform build, with 6 direct reports, leading both the technology transition as well as the team itself.

The games that Glu produces interact with their servers as REST clients using a series of Json APIs. As those contracts are embedded as libraries in the game code, desperately needed updates to the server solution had to continue to work seamlessly with multiple versions of each game title, any of which can have a year and a half to two year lifespan. In order to remedy current problems, head-off issues quietly growing, and make future desired functionality possible, it was necessary to restructure the database, replace the foundation upon which the JSON APIs were built, alter the contract with the game clients, and re-code the server top to bottom, most especially including the database interactions, all without disturbing any client code, no matter how old, operating 24 hours a day. In the process I’ve been involved with operations, marketing and production, created processes, published design documents, hired staff, mentored team members, presented solutions, presided over code reviews, produced estimates, and poured over change logs.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Responsible for the database, cache, transaction, and event architecture for Bizzy, a business to consumer social media site. Created a clustered, persistent, distributed cache layered over Terracotta. The cache itself is highly transparent, annotation driven, easily used by middle-ware/ business logic engineers, and capable of caching not only object instances, but sets of relationships (in order to act as a functional query cache). To that end, annotation-based transaction demarcation was integrated with the caching scheme. As most interactions with the cache/database would be tracked as events, an event capturing layer was created to handle high volumes without impacting other system components. Designed and implemented each of these systems, as well as creating numerous middle-ware business logic services, produced design documents, estimated project times, performed training and code-reviews, and mentored other employees.

New York, Ny, Us

Hired to re-envision and lead the re-implementation of the company’s application architecture, I introduced a Maven build process, broke the code-base up into manageable sub-projects, standardized on a modular Spring-base configuration scheme, re-mapped all data access via Hibernate-based objects, completely separated the PHP front-end confining all communication to standard web-service calls, modularized the data access scheme behind compose-able services, and planted it all on a basic service bus, with JMS communication pipes. This architecture provided horizontal scalability, inherent load-balancing, and, with the addition of a Terracotta managed second-level cache, almost transparent coherence and fault-tolerance for all services. Along with this came the usual responsibilities for producing design documents, estimating project times, performing training sessions and code-reviews, mentoring other employees, and participating in the interview and hiring process.

Oakland, California, Us

Served as a Platform Engineer for Rearden Commerce, the emerging leader in on-line and mobile service integration aimed at corporations. Rearden Commerce prides itself upon its pure SOA framework and its platform-as-a-service orientation. As part of a new team within the company aimed at promoting agile standards and practices, and re-architecting core layers of the proprietary platform, helped to bring the code base in-line with the company vision. Held responsibility for helping the team to serve as an island of excellence within Rearden Commerce, spearheading agile development practices, mentoring others, performing code-reviews, and developing and refactoring key architectural layers. Helped to initiate development within the new mobile group, created SOA based services, and managed initiatives in performance, tracing, logging, monitoring, and operations. Responsible for functional requirements, implementation, documentation, and training within these project domains.

Served as VP of Engineering for Active Investment Advisors, a division of Ixis, the largest separately managed account provider in the industry. Ixis purchased Active Index Advisors after it had proven its concept with a working implementation of its portfolio management technology, and gained a small but growing customer base. I was chosen to continue the project, leading the technology team in expanding the capability and scale of the portfolio management engine, and in developing capabilities to support the company’s unique investment processes.

Us

Contracted to be part of a small team of Java architects rebuilding the company’s market leading, but ailing, product catalog service, containing over 90 million product codes along with all the relevant product information. At the time of hire, the most current version of the catalog was over 8 months behind schedule and incapable of supporting fast approaching industry standards.

Westlake, Texas, Us

Attached to the Application Performance Engineering group of Schwab Technology Services, within Charles Schwab Inc., one of the world’s leading financial services companies. Contracted to assist the company in maintaining performance goals across its on-line offerings, while shifting many of its computing resources to middle-tier, distributed, J2EE based Unix environments, away from more traditional CICS mainframe environments.

Us

Served as VP of Engineering of MemeWorks, Inc., a re-engineered, start-up provider of online soft skills management and e-learning applications, with 15 employees. Instrumental in rejuvenating a stagnant company and rebuilding the core team and operations on a budget and staff 1/3 of its original size, while consistently meeting deadlines and exceeding customer expectations.

Managed and coordinated a team of 11 in the creation of internet based vertical market software capable of supporting all the functions of a business furnishings dealer, including catalog development, specification of furniture options, set-up of shipping, installation, and pricing details, automated on-line store creation, and intricate shopping cart interactions.

Us

Hired and managed a team of eight core people that established a coherent technical strategy for web programming projects, adopted and integrated new technologies, and developed a Java architecture aimed at allowing the fast creation of web-based, n-tier, ‘middleware’. Oversaw the design and implementation of all server-side services, data analysis and schema design, and integration of third-party products. Successfully implemented the core architecture and deployed it to support over 200 web sites. Served as the technical point of contact for web services to its internal customer base across departments company-wide.

Masters Of Integral Counseling Psychology, Psychology

Bachelor Of Applied Psychology, Psychology