May 2023 – Aug 2024 · 1 yr 3 mos · California, United States · Remote

Jul 2018 – Mar 2023 · 4 yrs 8 mos · San Francisco Bay Area · Hybrid

• Packets go in, packets come out. You can't explain that.
• I worked on serverless egress networking. App Engine and Cloud Run apps, plus Cloud Functions, can all talk to the internet. Customers can also configure their VPC networks to let serverless apps talk to their internal services and VMs. My team was responsible for making sure all that worked; we owned the data paths from app to internet and from app to VPC.
• Before that, I worked on a team that made cluster turnups more reliable. When building a data center, there's a point where you have a room full of computers, and there's a later point where you have a usable compute cluster that can run tasks. My team's job was to make that last step faster and more reliable.

Nov 2011 – Jun 2018 · 6 yrs 7 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Professional byte hoarder.
• Built a management console for OpenStack Swift clusters and enhanced Swift itself to work better in a company's own datacenter.
• The management console is a distributed application; there's a daemon on each Swift node that phones home via ZeroMQ to send monitoring telemetry (time-series data) and alerts as well as receive management commands.
• I enhanced Swift to work better in small clusters (say, fewer than 50 machines) and also to work in a globally-distributed setup with machines on multiple continents. I also worked on Swift's storage policy and erasure code support, so instead of everything being three replicas, users could choose based on availability requirements or cost.

Dec 2010 – Nov 2011 · 11 mos · San Francisco, California, United States · On-site

• Kept a bunch of high-traffic Rails apps up, running, and growing. Wrote a scalable metrics collection app. Modernized some old apps with the latest and greatest Ruby technologies of the time.

Dec 2008 – Dec 2010 · 2 yrs · San Francisco, California, United States · On-site

• Built a modern, cloud-hosted Ruby application environment on top of a very early, bare-bones AWS.
• I was a developer on cloud.engineyard.com, Engine Yard's Ruby-on-Rails-on-EC2 cloud computing application. It let developers easily deploy and scale their Rails applications on AWS.
• This was the very early days of AWS, so we had to build nearly everything ourselves. AWS gave us VMs, Elastic IPs, block devices, and S3 (for backups); from that, we built app deployments with three different Ruby app servers, automatic database replication and failover, load balancing, and everything else that AWS didn't do yet.
• (In future years, AWS would go on to do all these things. Engine Yard stood on the shoulders of a giant, and then the giant slowly ate Engine Yard, starting with the feet.)

Jul 2005 – Dec 2008 · 3 yrs 5 mos · San Mateo, California, United States · On-site

• Software developer on a ~10-person Extreme Programming team that was responsible for a large project written in object-oriented Perl. This involved a bunch of network programming and learning far more about the idiosyncrasies of 802.11a/b/g/n and various vendors' SNMP implementations than I care to admit.
• Company was acquired by Aruba Networks in March 2008.

Jun 2001 – Jun 2005 · 4 yrs · Livermore, California, United States · On-site

• Part-time internship in the Computer Security Organization writing small tools to help process and query network data.
• This was mostly summers, though I went in 8 hours per week during the school year.

Jun 2000 – Sep 2000 · 3 mos · Livermore, California, United States · On-site

• Internship in Engineering dept. at LLNL. I ported a timecard application from plain Perl/CGI to run under mod_perl and added some features to make it easier to use.