I came back to the BLOC Engineering team at Symantec to develop some next generation systems. Current major projects include an RPC based message testing system for use by many current systems to offload heavyweight processing onto purpose built services. Implementation tools include Scala/Java with MINA, C++ with Gearman, Google Protocol Buffers, Boost, and Poco.

At AdPerk I shifted my focus somewhat and spent a lot of time on our frontend application, built using mainly Adobe Flex. The application presents users with retailer video which the user can watch in exchange for special offers and coupons.

In addition, I focused some time on the backend of the application built using Python and Django, as well as working on our Amazon EC2 infrastructure.

As a member of Technorati’s Core Services team, we focused on back end infrastructure projects related to storage, services, caching and other applications and optimizations. Focused mainly on revamping the service infrastructure and replacing some old, worn out ‘web’ services with shiny new services built on Thrift and other technologies.

In addition, I played a role in software development process projects such as encouraging good build and release practices, evaluating and implementing tools to help front and back end developers be more effective, and encourage communication between groups.

At Brightmail/Symantec, I worked on a small team that was responsible for the development of our internal spam operations center. These tools were both automated and used by another internal group that was responsible for monitoring and fighting grouped spam attacks. The product itself consisted of both a Web front end using Apache/mod_perl and Mason, and many back end daemon processes written in Perl that processed incoming mail, handled anti-spam rule creation and management, and performed various other tasks. As a member of a small team, my time was often spent dealing with many aspects of a system that had an aggressive release cycle such as system design, new development, bug identification and fixing, performance testing and optimization, QA and Release issues such as bug prioritization, release packaging and delivery, and escalations from our operations department and users of our system.

Apache/mod_perl development of Ticketmaster.com

At Critical Path, I focused on the Webmail application, a large Web-based email application implemented in Apache/mod_perl.