The Evergreen State College

University of Chicago

Staff Engineer at Sony PlayStation Network

Lafayette, California, United States

Sony PlayStation Network

Staff Engineer

Sabbatical. Travelled. Exercised. Lost weight. Took courses.

Created Emailscript. Let's you easily hack your inbox to get it back under control.

Sabbatical

Principal

Worked with
Scala (Functional programming)
Java
Hadoop/Pig (Data analysis)
Ruby

Twitter

Senior Software Developer

Lead group of 5 senior developers to extend and improve the software platform that all of Vantos applications are written against.

Shipped numerous releases with ambitious features sets and tight deadlines. Lead two week Agile sprints. Coordinated with other team leads to make sure the platform team delivered the features and bug fixes most needed in each Sprint.

-  Lead effort to create the editing tool(s) for the platform. All applications are created with these tools.
-  Lead effort to create standalone version of the web application that can run on a laptop in disconnected mode.
-  Lead team effort to increase the client side performance by 300%
-  Lead team effort to reduce the network traffic by 200%

Programming on client done in ActionScript/Flex, GWT, JSP
Programming on server done in Java/Groovy

Vantos

Platform Team Lead

Created key components for the Vantos software platform.
Created a flexible and powerful framework for connecting Flex web forms to the server. Forms can nest and work with both tables and lists.
Created an extensible database framework that lets you change your database on the fly without needing to restart the server.
Created an extensible, scriptable publications system.

Senior Engineer

nternationalized Myrio’s Total Manage application. Also did general feature work for their 3.0 version. Total Manage is an n-tier J2EE application. The server is either Orion/Postgres or Oracle depending on their customer, and it uses BMP with a servlet acting as broker between the J2EE application and the various clients. The client applications range from web based (using JSP and applets) to a dedicated set-top Java client. Did significant work on all three levels of the n-tier application including the
database. Everything, including the set-top either ran on Linux or Solaris. The final phase of the project was to get all of the applications to run properly in Japanese and Korean.

Myrio Corporation

Consulting

Took the lead in solving performance and scaling problems for the application. Sped up the main publishing system to run 20 times faster. The main ASP site can now publish 40 million email per day without too much strain. Sped up the import system to run 5 times faster. Sped up text template processing to run 10 times faster. Analyzed and solved numerous database query performance issues. Scaled up code and database schema to work well with hundreds of millions of rows.
Created a simple but robust SMTP processor that can accept and store 100 messages per second (360,000 messages/hour) on low end hardware. Centralized the database schema into one xml file, and created a tool to allow complex, automatic schema updates when upgrading to a new version of the application. Created a flex based dashboard that provides the customer a convenient, centralized place to check on the status of their recent campaigns.
Created a custom language, called wsql, to allow arbitrary subscriber selection queries. Wsql is a very simplified version of SQL. It can be used to find, for example, all subscribers that live in Seattle, are female and have not yet been sent a particular email. Used javacc to handle wsql grammar parsing.
Took the lead in rearchitecting the platform to be more maintainable and robust. Introduced and evangelized JUnit testing. Started a beta program and recruited beta testers. Currently switching the code to a DAO model with an eye towards later switching to Hibernate.

Whatcounts

Senior Software Engineer

Independent, experimental game project. Created a client/server network based game where the players themselves create the game universe. There were two components, the client and the server. The client used Swing as an application framework, and Piccolo as a 2D graphics/scaling engine. The server used a J2EE EJB CMP 2.0 framework based on JBoss. The client communicated with the Linux server directly using RMI.

Cosmosgame

Founder

Created from scratch a web servlet application to record member profiles. The application was very scalable and robust. Significantly extended the capabilities of an internal XML parser/generator, and added a web service to the member profile app. Created a Java tool to automate configuration management across a large number of web applications. Created a generic mail servlet that allowed Disney web authors to include mail processing in their web sites. Acted as technical coordinator for an integration project that affected many groups at Disney. The integration project required patient communication and many meetings.
Helped create a mailing server program designed to handle sending out millions of email cards. This program replaced a program that could not handle the massive loads that Disney generated. Improved the performance from 1 message/second to over 140 messages/second. Part of this work involved updating and optimizing complicated stored SQL procedures called from JDBC. Much of the speed improvement came from creating a sophisticated, multi-threaded architecture.
Modified the main Walt Disney ISAPI dll to track incoming cookies. Coordinated with all online business divisions to record this tracking information.

The Walt Disney Company

Staff Software Engineer

Led creation of Japanese version of Bookshelf (an electronic dictionary). Full life cycle participation in project. Created product design, did scheduling, and hired development staff. Responsible for $1.8 million budget. Designed innovative, industry leading input method. Converted code to accept Japanese input, and then directly supervised two other programmers in adding extra features. Created detailed design specifications that were then used by the six man testing team to check the program functionality. At height of project oversaw the work of thirty (30) people working in both Redmond and Tokyo. Team meetings in Japan were all held in Japanese. Programming was done in C++/MFC for the application, and Perl for the dictionary data. Project shipped on time and under budget.

Microsoft

Development Lead/ Program Manager

Added ActiveX support to C++ word processing library. Became “wizard” on Japanese input and character issues. Designed and implemented Unicode solution for both Win95 and WinNT. Designed and implemented the most difficult of Japanese input methods (inline input).

Responsible for the entire design, scheduling and implementation of a major application (Letter Writer) in the Bob application suite. Full life cycle participation in project. Created one of the very first ActiveX servers using the first unstable, beta release of ActiveX. Made the underlying word processing engine into a stand alone component that could both embed other objects as well as provide word processing services to other applications in a language neutral way. Implemented a very innovative even revolutionary UI design. UI work was done (mostly) in VB. Word processing engine work was done in C++.

Software Design Engineer

Main programmer for this project. Directed the work of two programmers and two artists to create the Windows paint program called Rightpaint. Full life-cycle participation in project. Independently researched, designed, prototyped, and implemented this paint program. Rightpaint was one of the very first C++ applications for Windows. The design was very aggressively object oriented and included resource garbage collection.

Odysseus Levy