Software Engineer
Mountain View, California, Us
A startup that offered voice services such as sports scores, weather, and free phone calls. It competed with Tellme and actually beat them to national launch by a month. Bought out by AOL in 2000 just before the merger with TimeWarner.* Designed and built a suite of Java servlets to support editing A/B testing rules for AOL Search. This tool involved JDBC, Xerxes, and multithreaded servlets. (US patent 7,593,928, “Dynamically altering search result page layout to increase user response”, third author)* Designed and built a Java module for syncing calendar data that sits within a Funambol.com sync server (open source) and which connects user devices with AOL's calendar server.* Designed and built a webmail frontend (in Javascript and C#/ASP.NET) that supports low-end browsers and users with accessibility needs, all while providing an optimal experience for typical users. The National Federation for the Blind said it "stands head and shoulders" above Gmail.* Designed and built Ajax/Push protocol, plus AIM library facade (in Javascript and C#/ASP.NET), for AIMExpress, a browser-based IM client.* Designed and built Voicemail, Email, Address Book, PhoneCall, Sports, and Weather frontends (in C++) for the AOLbyPhone speech recognition service. The business logic and outside dependencies of any one of these apps are complicated enough to normally require a team each. Carried each one to completion while maintaining the others. At launch of Voicemail, we had 99.95% of user sessions experiencing no errors or delays.* Built SOAP client (in C) for exposing online picture storage as a virtual file system. This was published by AOL as an exemplar to partners who wanted to use our SOAP service.