Distinguished Engineer – Zynga Game Network, Inc.
July 2010 – October 2010 : Contract
October 2010 – Present : Full Time

Zynga is the preeminent developer of social games, best known for their hit offerings on Facebook. At Zynga I served in a variety of roles on several teams.

• On Café World I made individual contributions (1 year).
  • Added features, fixes, and optimizations on the client (AS3/JS/HTML) and on the server (LAMP, PHP+Memcache+MySQL).
  • Promoted culture shift toward more robust deployment infrastructure and test-driven development.
  • Served as backup CTO.
• On CityVille I served as studio architect (0.5 years).
  • Advised and participated in longer-range product planning.
  • Promoted culture shift toward incrasing automation and test-driven development, with an eye on derisking and accelerating feature delivery.
  • Led a significant back-end storage refactor in support of a long feature arc.
• On ChefVille I served as Game CTO (Technical Director) (1.5 years).
  • Advised on staffing needs.
  • Participated in strategic recruiting.
  • Set long-term technical arc and priorities.
  • Mentored widely, and trained the team to train itself.
  • ChefVille launched on time and scaled smoothly to 7 million DAU.
  • The ChefVille team transitioned smoothly from development to live operations, settling into regular feature cadence within a week of launch.
• In the Casino Division I served as Division CTO (0.5 years).
  • Oversaw and advised 4 Game CTOs.
  • Identified common challenges, opportunities for inter-studio cooperation, leverage.
  • Participated in strategic recruiting.
  • Provided strategic technical advising to members of C-Staff.

Software Engineer – DigitalGlobe, Inc.
April 2009 – July 2010

DigitalGlobe is a leading vendor of satellite and aerial earth imagery in both the private and public sectors.

• Worked on DG's High Performance Computing platform.
  • Elevated the deployment ergonomics of the existing system.
  • Identified and resolved performance hotspots, especially cluster-wide I/O gating issues.
  • Identified and resolved stability hotspots, both per-node and cluster-wide.
• Provided technical leadership which resulted in:
  • Successful outcome of a business emergency.
  • Octupling the maximum stable cluster size.
  • Quadrupling the throughput with fixed cluster size.

Software Architect – Hands-On Mobile, Inc (formerly Mforma Group, Inc.)
August 2004 – December 2008

• Worked on "Guitar Hero: World Tour Mobile", which received an IGN Editors' Choice Award in December 2008. This was a departure from my BREW specialization at Hands-On.
  • Architect for fundamental gameplay data formats; designed the game data production pipeline.
  • Architect for cross platform inter-client multiplayer protocol.
  • Lead engineer for J2ME client.
  • Major contributor to the audio data pipeline.
• Originator and benevolent dictator of Hands-On's BREW application framework. Technical lead for all BREW engineers in US. Developed tools for BREW engineers worldwide, including training engineers from Hands-On UK offices and transferring productivity tools, libraries, and best practices to Hands-On Korea and China offices.
• Lead successful company-wide migration from fragmented CVS solutions to a unified Subversion source control repository.
• Personally ported 8 applications from J2ME to BREW in 2 years and maintained running back catalog of 8 apps on constantly emerging new devices. Oversaw and assisted 2 junior and 1 intermediate engineers in the same. Our back catalog porting goal, usually met by the entire team, was 24 hour turn around time for new device support of 3-4 applications even in the presence of novel device quirks requiring research and recompile.
• Developed extensive set of test suite applications, particularly with an eye towards rapid discovery of the manifold device quirks encountered in the mobile domain, and wholesale incorporation of work-arounds into the back catalog.
• Streamlined and extended underlying porting library developed at FingerTwitch.

Contract Programmer and Senior Software Engineer – FingerTwitch, Inc.
May 2003 – August 2004

• Personally ported 12 applications from J2ME to BREW in 14 months.
• Primary architect and implementor of underlying porting and device abstraction framework. Features included partial C++ mimicry of major Java language features and libraries, memory management features, extensive compile-time and run-time asset manipulation pipelines, and an asset cache system that greatly softened the degredation of performance on low-capability devices.
• Due to the device constraints, minimizing codesize and RAM usage while maximizing performance was a paramount concern, while due to market characteristics maximizing productivity and throughput was the constant goal of the porting framework.
• FingerTwitch reached a successful purchase agreement with Hands-On (then known as Mforma Group, Inc.) in August 2004, in which I was designated key personnel and the porting framework I developed was designated the primary intangible asset.

Personal sabbatical
May 2001 – May 2003

Following demise of Xigo with the dot-boom, I took a two-year sabbatical to travel and study.

Senior Software Engineer – Xigo, Inc.
April 2000 – May 2001

• On Linux & Solaris, developed the Java back-end for an extensive text indexing system implementing real-time functionality for agent-based and traditional index operations, including optimized query evaluation and source document archiving.
• Implemented a recoverable and concurrent block file format, B+Trees, inverted indices, and other file and data structures supporting higher-level database operations. This led to two-and-a-half patent applications: one to minimize use of locking mechanisms in distributed system, two to speed up query evaluation.
• Restructured a query engine to support concurrent queries rapidly and efficiently. Maintained agent engine that supported millions of simultaneous pre-specified queries.
• Supported text indexing designed to handle hundreds of MB/day real-time news feeds to trigger from a pool of millions of agents with twenty-second latency and exposure for interactive user querying within thirty seconds.
• Co-structured and installed a staging system for functionality and compatibility testing. Included correctness, system latency, and load testing. Liased with quality assurance personnel to design test suite and intended server functionality. Similarly liased with operations department as each server version went into production.

• Implemented performance-critical, real-time multiplayer functionality in C++ for 3D games by extending a proprietary language with a custom peer-to-peer protocol. This code went into Lucas Arts' "Star Wars: Force Commander" and Ripcord's "Blademaster". Extensive co-design of "Force Commander" game multiplayer aspects; primary author of game multiplayer functionality.
• Extensive use of C++ standard libraries, particularly container templates, toward the goal of rapid development.
• Implemented high-level networking API for pre-existing game engine. Implemented custom real-time packet compression. Liased with dedicated multiplayer quality assurance team.
• Coded to DirectX 7.0, particularly DirectPlay.

• Worked on most aspects of networked multiplayer strategy games for Windows 95/98 on teams of two to four programmers.
• Primary author for UI and game state evaluation engines, co-author of data file formats and asset cache management, and supporting author for animation and networking systems.
• Primary coding in C++, with some tight ASM for custom draw routines and effects, and Java and Perl for offline production tools.
• Coded to MFC and DirectX 5.0 and 6.0, particularly DirectDraw, DirectInput, DirectPlay, and DirectSound.

Software Engineer – Quark, Inc.
February 1996 – September 1996

• Designed and implemented new features for the Quark Publishing System in C.
• Emphasized portability across multiple OS, GUI, and network standards.
• Coded cross-platform for MacOS 7.5.3 and Windows 95.

Education

Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, U.C. Berkeley, May 1996
Teaching Assistant, CS164: Programming Languages and Compilers

Technical Summary

I am generally fluent and flexible in von Neumann style Turing Machines, and idiomatic in the Unix design philosophy.

Programming Languages (highly experienced):  C/C++, Java, PHP, ActionScript3, Python, Ruby, Scheme.

Development Environments (preferred):  Linux and POSIX environments generally, GNU toolchain centered around Make; Emacs, Bash, Subversion.

Development Environments (highly experienced):  LAMP, BREW, J2ME

Additional professional experience: Tomcat, Lucene, Compass, Terracotta, Perl, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Perl, Pascal, SQL, Logo, and AppleSoft BASIC, Windows (preferably via Cygwin), MFC, MS Visual Studio, DirectX (including DirectDraw, Direct3D, and DirectPlay); MacOS Toolkit, Symantec C/C++, and Metrowerks C/C++; Apple II+ and TI/99 systems.