Work

I am a creative, meticulous problem-solver at home in the board room and the server room. I can write you a FUSE-based filesystem but clean up real nice to talk to regular humans about the schedule, budget, and goals of a large project. I have experience in building platforms, nurturing distributed systems, designing APIs, growing engineering teams, mentoring junior engineers, and creating great engineering culture.

My consulting practice focuses on technical assistance for growing startups: architecture and strategy for platform development and API design, technical due diligence on both humans and software, and tactical software engineering. I am in New York City and have extensive experience working remotely from a variety of time zones.

Contact me and we can talk about what I can do for you. Read on to learn more about me and enjoy my profile on LinkedIn.

Some things I have done:

• Served as CTO of two startups from inception to 30 employees
• Mentored engineers and cultivated supportive and productive engineering culture at Ning as the company grew from 6 to 172 people
• Designed many revisions of REST-based APIs for management of content and metadata
• Designed authentication and login systems for secure, shared
  profiles across different web sites
• Designed and lead the creation of a virtual currency and digital
  gifts system
• Profiled, measured, and improved performance on applications written
  in PHP, Javascript, and C
• Tracked down and repaired segfaults, data corruption, and other
  gnomish bugs with tools such as dtrace and gdb
• Written C-based PHP extensions to provide security sandboxing and
  trie-based text processing

Books I have written:

• PHP Cookbook, O’Reilly (3rd Edition: 2014; 2nd Edition 2006; 1st Edition 2002)
• Learning PHP 5, O’Reilly (2004)
• Essential PHP Tools, Apress (2004)

Speaking and Teaching

I have presented at lots of conferences, including:

• O’Reilly OSCON
• O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
• O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference
• USENIX
• Zend PHP Conference
• eBay Developers Conference
• NY PHP Conference

For more detail, see this big list of all my talks and presentatons.