David S. Email & Phone Number

Vancouver, Canada Area

Technology Stack – Highlighted the need for the operations team to have a well-defined list of internally supported technologies that could be used to steer the development teams towards using common 3rd party solutions (OS, webservers, DBs, Message Brokers, etc). Completed the first cut of the technology stack and worked with the development and operations teams to finalize the list. This is an ongoing process but has already started to reduce the wide variety of similar technologies that the operations needs to support.Budapest Team Startup – Built up a systems development team from scratch in Hungary training them to take over development and maintenance of the Antispam rule data and Web Threat URI list generation systems. Spent 4 weeks in the Budapest office doing training, mentoring, and new development.Project Rainbowdash – Architected a new backend database cluster for our Antispam metadata which is several TB in size. The new cluster required a tighter adherence to the SQL spec requiring every single query to be analyzed and fixed. Oversaw and tested the backup integration into a large DAS giving 6 weekly rotating and daily incremental backups.

Vancouver, Canada Area

Experience HighlightsLed a team of 2-4 developers managing their day to day duties repackaging and redeploying many of the aging SophosLabs systems. Developed and honed a technique using OS native packages (.deb, .ebuild) to configure hosts allowing us to phase out our use of Puppet.Project Eve – A fully automated malware harvester, Eve uses an image recognition library to automate clicks and simulate user interaction. Designed and developed the VM automation, the user simulation via image recognition, and PCAP analysis system.Project Forest Fog - An IP concealing system for Internet access, Forest Fog provides systems with the ability to choose their egress from 600 IPs spread across 42 non-contiguous subnets over 4 Internet feeds, with per connection granularity. Drove the purchasing for 3 of the 4 Internet feeds, overseeing that the complex requirements like PTR DNS and IP Whois were provisioned exactly as specified. Forest Fog is used by all major SophosLabs systems that access live malware.Project Portal – A large internal website with analyst tools needed a performance boost. Designed a 3 tier delivery system (4x cache, 4x load balancer, 2x webserver) with caches located in each of our 4 Labs. Reworked many pages so dynamic content would be cached with per-page configurable TTL. At project completion 100% of static content and a large portion of the dynamic content was cached. A huge win and many kudos from satisfied analysts.Project Caliper – System to generate antispam catch rate statistics among internal and 3rd party products. Conceived and championed the project, and led a team of 3 during development. Designed and developed an IP forging system that allowed seamless testing of products that did source IP lookups.

Vancouver, Canada Area

Experience HighlightsActivePerl Tech Lead - ActivePerl is the #1 distribution of Perl on Windows. Worked with the core Perl devs to keep our tree up to date and pushed our local changes upstream. Scheduled releases based on new functionality or significant bug fixes coming from core Perl as applicable. Triaged bugs and owned the various public mailing lists. Worked with sales in many OEM redistribution deals. PerlMx - PerlMx is a spam and virus filtering engine for email. Wrote tools to do benchmarking and stress testing pre-release. Worked on developing antispam rules for the initial release of the AntiSpam engine and later was the engine lead responsible for new features. Added a rule benchmarker to the product that ran each rule multiple times instead of once to get more accurate timing info and provided a report of the most expensive rules.Perl Dev Kit – Completed the remote debugging capability of the GUI debugger after the initial developer departed mid-project.

Tech lead developing environmental software for the mining and forestry industries, the GVRD Municipality, and the YVR Airport Authority.Designed and developed the DMS - Discharge Management System for the GVRD Sewerage Discharging Permitting System.Developed a graphing module for the YVR Authority's rainwater sampling program.Developed the EMS - Environmental Management System for Forestry Mills and Woodland sites (later eDICTS).

Education record

Applied Computer Science Technology Diploma, Computer Science

Activities and Societies: Hardware hacking and breadboard groupWork Term Program