Working in the Storage and Availability group.

I help improve Riak, a highly scalable NoSQL distributed database. The work requires knowledge of distributed systems theory, database internals, networking, low level concurrency and performance optimization. We use a combination of Erlang and C/C++. I have helped in a number of areas:- Testing infrastructure.- Core key/value engine, especially startup speed.- Secondary index queries.- Bitcask storage engine.- LevelDB storage engine.I regularly help performance tune and troubleshoot customer clusters fires. I have been the team lead for the multi data center replication team, and currently lead the storage backends team. Work is done remotely and mostly in my pajamas.

Worked in the Contacts team maintaining a Java web service with a Django/Python/Backbone frontend, and the analytics pipeline behind it running on Hadoop, Hive and HBase.

Worked on a video game for children inspired by my daughter’s favorite game and character designs using Unity3D and Blender. Made a mobile optimized 4-inline multi-player game using HTML5, WebSockets, jQueryMobile and Erlang in the back end. Worked on a video game commissioned by the Department of Transportation in Puerto Rico.

Helped maintain and improve one of the largest Lucene deployments in the world. Crimson Hexagon has stored more than 100 billion social media posts from a variety of sources (Twitter, facebook, Internet forums, etc). The work involved improvements to the web application used by customers to analyze the vast data set and extract meaning from it, and also fixes and improvements to the infrastructure that collects and stores the data, a bit of DevOps action when things went wrong in the middle of the night, performance tuning heavily used Postgres databases to handle Twitter data (including low level tweaking of the OS virtual memory settings) and more. The work was done in Java (Hibernate, Spring MVC, Lucene).

I was the software monkey for a group of MIT materials scientists. Streamlined and automated data processing in their HPC cluster. Implemented and optimized material properties computation algorithms to run incrementally, concurrently and efficiently. Improved performance of the Postgresql database by up to 2 orders of magnitude. Built automated daily reports to monitor progress of simulations. Optimized the Java Swing analysis and visualization app, added material design and job submission features. I had to spend long hours studying Chemistry, Math and Physics to survive in a world of PhDs. And I did it all in my pajamas, working from home.The simulation work was successful and the group got funding from ARPA-E and private investors to build a lab. Pellion’s cutting edge approach used the results of our massive computer simulations of materials to guide the experimental work in the search for a Lithium Ion battery replacement. I built them a custom laboratory software system comprising an electronic notebook system, task and project management, and tools to streamline the collection, analysis and visualization of experimental synthesis and electrochemical data that was fully integrated with the material simulation results coming from our cluster. Work was done in ASP.NET, SQL Server, jQuery, C# and Java services.

Helping out my old employer with some challenging data processing projects for big customers (Echostar and EBay), tuning a 40h data crunching process to run in under 5h. This was a temporary, part-time position working remotely.

Studied game development, modern graphics programming, game AI, 3D modeling and audio programming. I worked on my own open source Ogre3D C++ based game project http://hunter.sf.net and contributed to the indie game Aztaka.

As one of the first developers to join the company, I worked on many projects and demos involving complex and ever-changing customized recommendation algorithms for big name customers on extremely tight schedules. Our architecture included a core C++ multi-threaded recommendation engine back end, Java web applications and offline user data processing. I left my mark in every area of the system. Close collaboration with scientists and content experts was always required to deliver our solutions.I did a lot of early Java UI apps for demos. Worked on high traffic java web applications running in some of the web's busiest portals. Developed complex, concurrent algorithms in C++ for our recommendations engine. Built a Java MVC web framework. Designed and implemented the Pipeline infrastructure for the C++ service. Designed and implemented a Java/SQL framework for large scale data processing. I was mainly responsible for improving offline data processing time from 80 hours to under 3.

Worked on the display component of the STARS Air Traffic Control system fixing bugs and implementing the main toolbar UI. Coding was done in C, X11 and Motif. Also worked creating Java Swing based screens for a Navy terminal project.