Rob Mela Email & Phone Number

Waltham, Massachusetts, United States

Needham, Massachusetts

Design and implement services and APIs for in-house sales forecasting system using NodeJS and SQL. Assist operations support by creating monitoring and system maintenance scripts.Implemented automated Point-of-sale data feeds, from discovery of available data, identifying business contacts, through design and implementation of data acquisition and processing pipelines.

Cambridge, Ma

New features and maintenance of a portfolio manage ment system using Ruby on Rails. I tended to pick up the back-end grunt work, some of it surprisingly daunting, that others didn't want or otherwise avoided.Implemented a parallel test runner that brought our test run times from 3hrs down to 20 minutes ( off-the-shelf solutions didn't work due to some unfortunate dependencies between tests ).Designed and Implemented a library to quantify tax efficiencies of Smartleaf's portfolio rebalancing system, as well as high-speed parallel jobs to back-fill tax savings data for previous years ( Just the library - the algorithm was devised by our financial engineering group )Provided significant database performance enhancements.

Reference implementations of embedded software for consumer and digital signage client devices to use Thinking Screen media content services ( Linux, Windows, C++, Roku BrightScript )

Design and build yet more mission-critical servers in Java and C++. Designed and created high volume HTML to JPEG conversion service for displaying content on digital picture frames. Used Qt, C++ and WebKit (years before the advent of PhantomJS or headless Chrome ).Wrote scripts to scrape and format news RSS feeds and other data sources for display on digital picture frames. Wrote RSS feed server for controlling digital picture frame feeds ( Java, Tomcat, Servlets, JDBC, MySQL )Performed so-so job of systems administration until a real systems engineer could be hired.

More multithreaded, C++ server work, this time in a Windows Server environment.

Integrate or modify common, off-the-shelf open source components for rapid proof-of-concept or launch platforms for new ventures, or or quick-turnaround system enhancements for small businesses.

Designed and built ZDNet's in-house ad server which delivered all ZDNet and Gamespot ads. The server went on to replace CNET's Accipiter installation after CNET's purchase of ZDNet. Led the redesign and coding of a second-generation ad server which currrently responsible for nearly all CNET ad revenue. Miscellaneous other tasks included reporting ( Perl, Java ), log file parsing ( C++, Perl ), network and OS performance diagnostics, etc.

Designed and implemented web log processing jobs in C++ and Perl. Included distributed data processing pipelines in Ascential's Orchestrate ( now part of IBM Data Stage ) using C++.Designed and implemented rock-solid, flexible, high-speed ad delivery server which was selected over a vendor server and continued serving all ZDNet ad content until acquisition by CNET. Implemented Apache modules to interact with the ad server.

Started as programmer trainee in COBOL and JCL, migrated to Web Development group experimenting with Web to back-end data integrations using C++.