---
title: "Resume"
date: 2023-09-13T15:08:12-07:00
draft: false
---
<section class="content">
    <h1>Resume</h1>

    <ul>
        <li>
            <a href="#work-experience">Work Experience</a>
        </li>
        <li>
            <a href="#education">Education</a>
        </li>
    </ul>

    <h3 id="work-experience" class="anchor">Work Experience</h3>
</section>

<!-- Meta -->
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        <img src="/img/meta.jpg" width="32" height="32" alt="Meta company logo">
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Software Engineer <small class="has-text-grey">@ Meta</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>Mar 2023 - Present | Portland, OR (Remote)</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <p>
        Supernatural was <a href="https://www.latest.oculus.com/blog/within-to-join-meta/" target="_blank">acquired by Meta</a>
        in March 2023 to bring our VR application in-house as a first-party Oculus studio.
    </p>
    <ul>
        <li>
            I helped spearhead the data migration effort (along with a few other senior engineers) to adapt Supernatural's
            database and API servers into Meta's infrastructure (rewriting back-end services from Python into Hack).
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <i class="fab fa-python"></i> Python (Flask, SQLAlchemy); <i class="fab fa-js"></i> JavaScript (Vue.js);
            <i class="fab fa-php"></i> Hack (like PHP); Graph API; GraphQL; several proprietary internal tools for CI/CD,
            issue management, code review, etc.
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<!-- Supernatural -->
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Principal Software Engineer <small class="has-text-grey">@ Supernatural</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>Oct 2018 - Mar 2023 | Los Angeles, CA</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <p>
        Within rebranded to Supernatural named after the Oculus VR app of the same title after finding a
        market fit with that application.
    </p>
    <ul>
        <li>
            I helped build out the back-end Python API server for Supernatural and its deployment pipeline on
            AWS Elastic Beanstalk <small>(and later in <abbr title="Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service">EKS</abbr>)</small>.
        </li>
        <li>
            I extended the Within CMS to support managing content &amp; data for Supernatural before forking
            the CMS into a dedicated app for Supernatural.
        </li>
        <li>
            I built an internal Music Curation tool <small>(named Wormhole)</small> to help the content team
            identify and manage licensed music to use with the app. It provided a user interface to peruse
            the massive volume of music data delivered to us by our partner labels (sent in <abbr title="Digital Data Exchange">DDEX</abbr> feed
            format). Behind the web app was a pipeline of Python worker scripts that ingested the DDEX feeds
            and handled licensing updates and metadata sync (with Spotify and Music Reports, Inc). Wormhole
            was backed by a Mongo DB which was the best fit for the loosely structured music data we were working with.
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <i class="fab fa-python"></i> Python (Flask, SQLAlchemy); <i class="fab fa-golang"></i> Go;
            <i class="fab fa-js"></i> JavaScript (Vue.js); <i class="fab fa-github"></i> GitHub;
            <i class="fab fa-docker"></i> Docker; MongoDB; PostgreSQL; Redis; AWS
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<!-- Within -->
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Senior Software Engineer <small class="has-text-grey">@ Within (Virtual Reality)</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>Apr 2017 - Mar 2023 | Los Angeles, CA</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <p>
        I joined Within back when their primary product was a <abbr title="Virtual Reality">VR</abbr> 360&deg; video
        streaming platform <small>(with multiple web &amp; native apps)</small>, where videos were published via hand-edited JSON
        files (unique format per platform) and there were no dynamic web apps within the company. Within had ambitions to create a
        "Lobby" app for you &amp; your friends to hang out in VR and join multiplayer "interactive experiences" together.
    </p>
    <ul>
        <li>
            I built out a Python microservice architecture that included an Authentication service (centralized
            user accounts for the Lobby app) and a Matchmaking service to coordinate multiplayer VR games. I also
            created a custom Push Notification service (written in Go) to target our desktop apps and website,
            which did not have a native push mechanism like Android or iOS do.
        </li>
        <li>
            I built a Content Management System (CMS) in Python to consolidate and automate the content
            publishing pipeline for the 360&deg; VR streaming platform. I studied the various legacy JSON config
            formats (for the Android, iOS, PS VR, web player, and Unity stand-alone VR player apps) to determine
            the commonalities and data requirements to translate into a relational (PostgreSQL) database and
            CMS platform.
            <ul>
                <li>The video transcoding pipeline was based on <code>ffmpeg</code> via a third party API called Hybrik.</li>
                <li>The CMS also managed Unity asset bundles and content publishing for our VR interactive experiences.</li>
            </ul>
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <i class="fab fa-python"></i> Python (Flask, SQLAlchemy); <i class="fab fa-golang"></i> Go;
            <i class="fab fa-js"></i> JavaScript (Vue.js, Photon); <i class="fab fa-github"></i> GitHub;
            <i class="fab fa-docker"></i> Docker; ffmpeg; PostgreSQL; Redis;
            <abbr title="Amazon Web Services">AWS</abbr> (Elastic Beanstalk, S3)
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<!-- Media Temple -->
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Software Developer <small class="has-text-grey">@ (mt) Media Temple</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>Dec 2015 - Apr 2017 | Culver City, CA</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <ul class="mt-0">
        <li>
            Built out Python microservices (Tornado framework) to translate between Media Temple and parent company
            GoDaddy's systems (for example, a Payments service that ran within a secure server on GoDaddy's infrastructure
            and was called out to from legacy Perl apps at Media Temple).
        </li>
        <li>
            Helped maintain and add new features to a legacy Perl codebase (including the Account Center web app).
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <i class="fab fa-python"></i> Python (Tornado);
            <img src="/images/perl.png" width="12" height="12"> Perl (Template::Toolkit, Moose);
            Puppet; RabbitMQ; cgit; Atlassian FishEye &amp; Crucible.
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<!-- ZEFR -->
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Software Engineer <small class="has-text-grey">@ ZEFR</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>May 2013 - Dec 2015 | Venice, CA</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <ul class="mt-0">
        <li>
            Built out a Python/Flask web app called <abbr title="Brand ID">BrandID</abbr> that provided search and
            notifications for brand managers regarding YouTube. The idea was that if a video was about to go
            viral about your brand, you should hear about it from us first. <small>(We had code that would deeply crawl
            YouTube daily and make predictions based on view counts and trends detected).</small>
        </li>
        <li>
            Also built out a free-to-use, consumer facing app called BrandID Pulse where users could input topics
            they're interested in and get daily digest e-mails of new and trending videos that match their interests.
        </li>
        <li>
            Helped build out an advertising platform that helped match advertisers to specific YouTube videos that
            we detected are about to go viral. <small>(On Google's ad platform, you can either target general demographics
            or you can target specific Video IDs, but the latter feature is rarely used because it was tedious and unpredictable;
            ZEFR's product helped match advertisers to specific videos relevant to their brand that were detected to be going
            viral, e.g. the same data that powered BrandID).</small>
        </li>
        <li>
            Upgraded several codebases from Python 2 to 3;
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <i class="fab fa-python"></i> Python (Flash, Celery); <i class="fab fa-js"></i> JavaScript (jQuery, Knockout.js, Angular, MEAN stack);
            <i class="fab fa-github"></i> GitHub; MongoDB; PostgreSQL; Redis; Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS, SES, Elastic Beanstalk, RDS);
            HTML/CSS (Bootstrap); <i class="fab fa-docker"></i> Docker; Jenkins
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<!-- DreamHost -->
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Senior Hosting Developer <small class="has-text-grey">@ DreamHost</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>Feb 2012 - Apr 2013 | Los Angeles, CA</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <ul class="mt-0">
        <li>
            I helped maintain and add features to web apps written in Perl (using a custom <abbr title="Object Relational Mapper">ORM</abbr>
            and templating system for server-side rendered pages) and HTML/JavaScript (jQuery).
        </li>
        <li>
            Projects included work on the customer Control Panel, report automations for financial &amp; marketing,
            and integration for customer sites and <i class="fab fa-cloudflare"></i> Cloudflare.
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <img src="/images/perl.png" width="12" height="12"> Perl;
            <i class="fab fa-javascript"></i> JavaScript;
            Chef; RabbitMQ; cgit.
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<!-- Fonality -->
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Software Engineer <small class="has-text-grey">@ Fonality</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>Jun 2008 - Feb 2012 | Culver City, CA</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <ul class="mt-0">
        <li>
            Maintained and contributed features for a customer control panel (written in Perl) for
            Asterisk <abbr title="Private Branch Exchange (Business telephone system)">PBX</abbr> servers
            (running a custom CentOS-based operating system branded as PBXtra and Trixbox).
        </li>
        <li>
            One project had me port our PBXtra OS to newer Dell server blades after our OEM discontinued
            the model we were selling. PBXtra was based on the (already outdated) CentOS 4 which lacked hardware
            drivers to support the new blades. I troubleshooted and created new installation ISOs that slipstreamed
            an updated Linux kernel and CD-ROM driver to function on these newer servers.
        </li>
        <li>
            Worked on an HTML5 web front-end for Fonality HUD (an in-house softphone and productivity tool that
            showed online/call status of your co-workers and managed chat and calls).
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <img src="/images/perl.png" width="12" height="12"> Perl (Template::Toolkit, Moose);
            <i class="fab fa-javascript"></i> HTML/JavaScript (jQuery in some places, mostly vanilla JS, AJAX);
            <i class="fab fa-asterisk"></i> Asterisk; MySQL; Linux (CentOS)
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<!-- Liquid Web-->
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        <h4 class="subtitle mb-0">Linux Systems Administrator <small class="has-text-grey">@ Liquid Web</small></h4>
        <p>
            <small>Jan 2008 - May 2008 | Lansing, MI</small>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>
<div class="content smaller ml-5">
    <p>
        The job description was tech support and tech support at a web hosting company is synonymous with
        systems administration. A large portion of our customer base ran Linux servers (CentOS). My aim was
        to get hired as a software developer but as I had no prior work experience they started me out in
        support.
    </p>
    <ul>
        <li>
            Helped customers debug issues with their Apache config, managed cPanel installations,
            reading exim logs, and wrote custom Perl scripts to help me troubleshoot their e-mail
            servers and other such tasks.
        </li>
        <li>
            After a couple months I transitioned to the software dev team and worked on some internal
            tools and the customer control panel written in Perl.
        </li>
        <li>
            <strong>Technologies:</strong>
            <img src="/images/perl.png" width="12" height="12"> Perl (Template::Toolkit, POE);
            <i class="fab fa-javascript"></i> HTML/JavaScript (jQuery); CVS version control;
            MySQL; Linux (CentOS)
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

<hr>

<section class="content">
    <h3 id="education" class="anchor">Education</h3>

    <h5 class="mb-0">ITT Technical Institute</h5>
    <p class="smaller">
        <em>Associates, Computer Network Systems</em><br>
        <small>2006 - 2009 | Swartz Creek, MI | Culver City, CA | Torrance, CA</small>
    </p>

    <h5 class="mb-0">Flushing High School</h5>
    <p class="smaller">
        <small>2002 - 2006 | Flushing, MI</small>
    </p>
</section>