Senior Software Engineer - AMP Editorial Workflow Engineering at Apple

Workflow Operations orginally started as a team building out a new workflow platform specically for AMP/ASE Editoral organization, but we quickly were spun off and "re-orged" into a team providing an Apple Services Engineering-wide (ASE) and then Apple-wide shared Workflow Platform.

Key Personal Achievements:

Architect and Directly Responsible Indvidual (DRI) of an AVRO based entity storage system backed by a Cassandra database that is currently serving ~500k AVRO entities a day.

Architect and DRI of a drop-in replacement worklisting system for ASE Editoral that quickly morphed into a second version of the service that is now used by various teams across Apple.  This service uses Cassandra database as a "source of truth" and uses Solr for quick indexing and querying.

Both services required extensive collaboration with various teams/services across Apple to get from a local application on my laptop to being deployed as mission critcal production ready infrasture used across Apple.

Both services have complete OpenAPI/Swagger specs available to any potential users.

Both services can be accessed via a custom Java client or through the documented API.

Both services have 85%+ unit test coverage.

Architected and built partial and full reindexing services to get "source of truth" data from Cassandra to Solr.

Sheparded existing worklist web application from a contractor "hobby project" to production deployment.

Did extensive research into Solr/Lucene edge-cases that allowed me and our team to build Solr schemas/indexers/tokenizers that fulfilled very specific business needs of our internal customers.

Acted as "tier 1 support" for teams looking to intergrate with our services or teams looking to migrate from one version of our services to another.

Researched/Troubleshot/Diagnosed production/QA issues involving (but not limited to) technical infrastructure such as: Kubernetes/Solr/Cassandra/networking/identity services/DNS/GSLB/task queues/etc.

Apple

Senior Software Engineer/Architect - ASE Workflow Operations

My team started building what became Apple Music for Artists in late 2016. This was a way for artists on Apple Music to view analytics related to their content. The aggregate data was processed and loaded to Cassandra by other teams and we built the "front end" APIs and UI to display this information to the artist. We also revamped the "Artist Management" portions of our previous application (ArtistConnect) that we shipped leading up to the original Apple Music launch.

3-4 months before our beta launch, my team was "re-orged" into a more analytics focused organization named Apple Media Products (AMP) Analytics - Engineering.

Because of this re-org, we ended up taking over a product called (publicly) App Analytics. This is a portion of App Store Connect where app developers and providers can view analytics for their iOS/AppleTV applications. While App Analytics was built by a previous team, I took over as lead engineer as all former developers of the app were no longer part of my larger team.

Software Engineer - AMP Analytics Engineering

After Beats Music was acquired by Apple, I quickly learned to navigate internal processes of iTunes Store Engineering organization in order to effectively contribute to Apple Music project.

Built extensive amount Jersey/Jetty applications using JAX-RS for the API layer, with Angular 1.x on the front end. The far majority of work was done on the API layer.

Lead initiatives to streamline internal development processes and procedures.

Migrated custom Vagrant and Sinopia build process to an internal officially supported Docker/Artifactory setup.

Lead team during large portion of crunch time leading to Apple Music launch, as result of manager going on paternity leave for a number of weeks.

Participated in, and contributed to, daily planning/status sessions of larger Apple Music project.

Software Engineer - Apple Music

Beats Music

Software Engineer

Technical lead engineer responsible for legacy Rails 2.3 application suite responsible for 90%+ of company revenue.

Troubleshooted code and processes built by engineers no longer with company.

Implemented procedures such as requiring passing test suited and end to end "Getting Started" documentation.

Converted large (30 servers) and diverse (app servers, database servers, data warehouse, transcoders, job processors, FTP servers, ETC.) datacenter setup to AWS using Chef and multiple AWS technologies (EC2, S3, CloudFront, IAM, VPC, etc.)

Refactored applications extensively in order to support AWS migtation.

Examples:

Rewrote app to store/retrieve assets in S3 In order to support transition from centralized file store into a decentralized S3 setup. This also required changing "create zip file on demand" into a "build/cache zip file as static asset if does not already exist" because of limitations in Amazon's Elastic Load Balancers verses the previous F5 load balancers in datacenter setup.

Transcoders were originally built as Apple Xserve machines and required modifications to FFMPEG configurations in order to be deployed as Ubuntu AWS instances.
Worked with other teams (Operations, Customer Service, Artist Relations) in order to implement fixes and features that enabled them to be more effective.

Topspin Media

Software Developer

Built world-class web applications, mostly in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

Helped run, and participated in, multiple "Hackfests" put on by Quick Left. These are popular, and highly regarded, events in the Boulder tech community.

Projects

Helped integrate customer's SOAP API into a Rails/Backbone.js application. This also included integrating with customer's JBoss Picketlink server in order to get SAML assertions (tokens) to interface with this API.

Much of the data used for the Rails application was contained inside their existing infrastructure, but this API integration allowed the Rails app to "cache" local copies of the data elements. Changes inside the Rails application were in turn "pushed up" to customer's existing infrastructure.

SOAP integration was done at the model layer, therefore allowing rest of the application, (controllers, views, etc) to be "ignorant" of the integration.

Converting a data model class to be "Soap Enabled" took just including a module and a YAML configuration file.

Wrote unit and feature tests using RSpec and Capybara.

Assisted other development projects in such diverse subjects as: SSL certs, Facebook Open Graph integration, DevOps, etc.

Quick Left

Senior Software Developer

Functioned extremely well in an angel funded startup environment.

Core resource in Rails 2.3 - Rails 3 conversation.

Re-engineered Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 infrastructure using Rubber gem, thereby lowering monthly costs by ~50% ($8k -> $4k).

New AWS setup reduced "scale up" time for major events from hours to minutes.

Designed and built out a realtime notification system using a combination of Redis, Socket.IO, and Node.js

Added functionality and fixed code flaws in 3rd party open source tools, then pushed up modifications so entire open source community could take advantage of changes.

Worked on all aspects of the application stack. Everything from troubleshooting EC2 instance DNS resolution problems, to complex jQuery front end changes.

Helped built out an automated test suite that included RSpec, Jasmine, and Selenium tests.

Integrated Stageit application with Facebook using their Open Graph platform, thereby allowing users to post actions (bought a ticket, attended a show) to their "Timeline".

Part of effort to convert 1000's of lines of JavaScript "spaghetti code" into streamlined CoffeeScript

StageIt

Senior Software Engineer

Played an IT Operations role and completed “Run the Business” tasks such as: incident management, application/OS/hardware troubleshooting, backups, hardware/software upgrades, etc.

Part of 8 member team responsible for patching and maintaining 1,500+ servers (virtual and physical) spread out over several datacenters.

Participated in an on-call rotation.

Worked with members of security team to remediate 100’s of security vulnerabilities. This included matching up security scans with CVE lists in order to plan and execute configuration changes/upgrades that fixed the vulnerabilities.

Used developer experience to create custom reporting and log parsing applications in technologies such as: Ruby on Rails, Perl, and SQL Server Reporting Services. These custom apps saved many man-hours of work for the larger team, and in some cases made imposable tasks become possible.

Assisted Engineering team in server build outs and special projects such as security vulnerability remediation.

Intuit

Windows Systems Engineer

Used CakePHP framework to build an iPhone specific website.

After 2009 sale of MyCorporation, designed, built, deployed, and maintained a Win2k3/Win2k8 environment since entire IT infrastructure and IT support was provided by Intuit at the time.

New deployment included:
  16 servers over two sites (home office and CoLo)
  25+ workstations/laptops
  Multiple Domain Controller Active Directory setup
  Group Policy
  Windows Server Update Services
  Exchange Server 2007
  Symantec Backup Exec and Endpoint Protection
  Help Desk Support

MyCorporation

Contractor

Part of a “SWAT Team” tasked with fixing production issues as fast as possible.

Often tasked with troubleshooting critical applications where all developers familiar with the code had left the company months, sometimes years, in the past.

Built and maintained both internal and external facing web applications as a principal developer using such technologies as ASP, ASP.NET, JavaScript, JSP, Perl

Performed extensive QuickBase modifications in order to build tools for internal company use.

Built and maintained normalized databases, views, stored procedures, SSIS packages (Integration Services), online reports (Reporting Services) using Microsoft SQL Server. Worked with end users to create use cases for internal development projects

TelePacific Communications

Designed/built/maintained both internal and external facing web applications as a principal developer using ASP, JavaScript, AJAX, DHTML.

Applied bug fixes and made minor modifications to both internal and external facing web applications built using JSF, Java, Spring, Hibernate, AJAX.

Mentored/managed junior developer and offshore development team

Designed/built/maintained normalized databases, views, stored procedures and triggers for both 

Microsoft SQL Server (2000 and 2005) and MySQL 5 database servers

Built/Deployed/Maintained multiple Windows 2000/2003 servers

Maintained Exchange and Active Directory systems

Coordinated network/system/application teams to build multiple environments (Dev/QA/Production) necessary for application development

Assisted in completing end-to-end research for new products and services

Worked with end users to create use cases for internal development projects

Functioned as development team’s main source of industry knowledge

Worked with legal department as main technical resource during acquisition due diligence process

Main MyCorp IT resource in multiple IT integration projects after Intuit acquisition.

Nick Messick