In addition to building resilient systems to keep Socrata up-and-running, scaling with customer demand, and removing technical obstacles for our engineering staff to build great new things, I now lead a team of like-minded engineers, and focus on interviewing, training, and growing engineers within the discipline.

I've been at Socrata since a few months after it was founded, and am the longest tenured employee there. In my time there, I've been a software engineer (frontend and backend), tester, build engineer, DBA, security compliance officer, contingency planner, network engineer, and probably a dozen other titles as they've been necessary.Most of my current work focuses on security compliance (FISMA within the US Federal sector) and DevOps-focused work: building resilient systems to keep Socrata up-and-running, scaling with customer demand, and removing technical obstacles for our engineering staff to build great new things.

The Find My Stuff team was merged into the Windows Experience team, and chartered with the task of making find and organize scenarios even better in the next release of Windows. During this time, I focused on a small point release to Windows Desktop Search for XP (version 3.01) and did some early prototypes for future Windows development.

The Find My Stuff team produced two different products: Windows Desktop Search (known earlier as MSN Desktop Search), and an unreleased (but publicly disclosed) product called Windows Search Preview.I was a developer for Windows Desktop Search 3.0, which combined Microsoft's disparate search strategy across MSN, Windows Vista, Office, and Sharepoint into one unified search engine. I was the only developer working on the user interface for the Windows XP version of WDS 3.0, which uses the same underlying technology as the search engine built in to Windows Vista.In November 2006, the Find My Stuff team was merged in with the Windows Experience team, with an expanded charter to deliver a solution for finding and organizing data across all of Windows.

MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger) is one of the largest instant messaging networks in the world, operating in 40 markets with millions of simultaneous logged-in users.During my time on the Messenger team:1. I was the primary developer for Winks, a feature first introduced in threedegrees allowing friends to send animations with sound to their friends. Unlike the threedegrees feature, Winks in Messenger introduced a new revenue source for Microsoft and third-party content partners.2. I worked on the video conversation feature, which allows full-screen webcam functionality with sound over Messenger's P2P platform.3. I worked on the replication engine of the sharing folders feature.4. I implemented a simple way for features within Messenger to deactivate themselves if signaled by the central servers, to prevent the spread of potential viruses and worms.5. I was one of the active bloggers on the team blog, MessengerSays.

The Netgen team was an incubation group at Microsoft responsible for creating products for the "Internet Generation" - 13-24 year olds. Coming here straight from college, I was the youngest employee on the team (by a whole 3 days) and had the awesome job of writing software for a target market that included me.We developed an application called threedegrees, which was a social application that helped people hang out online together. It was built on the windows P2P networking framework, and one of the first real IPv6 applications.I was responsible for winks, a feature that let you send animations and sounds to your friends; and the group folder functionality, a simple file sharing tool to broadcast files to your friends.The Netgen team was disbanded in 2004, with the majority of the ideas from the project and the employees moving into the MSN Messenger team.

The computer science department at HMC was run with one full-time system administrator, one faculty liason, and about a dozen student staff. About half the time I was there, we were also lacking the full-time system administrator.I cut my teeth as a UNIX admin working with Solaris 7-9 on an UltraSPARC Enterprise 3000, a collection Netapps filers, and a handful of OpenBSD and Linux machines. Although everyone had to be a jack-of-all trades, I focused a lot on the networking, firewall, and Solaris JumpStart infrastructure.

Back in high school and college, I spent four summers in Southern California getting paid to be at the beach all day. (Trust me, it's nothing like Baywatch in real life.) During this time I also attained my California Emergency Medical Technician certification. I also acted as an instructor for the city's very successful Jr. Lifeguard program, and did some of my first professional development building a Microsoft Access solution to track student registration, payments, and uniform orders.