Principal Engineer @ From December 2014 to Present (1 year 1 month) Greater New York City AreaSenior Developer / Architecture Team Lead @ Set up a distributed work queue and initiated move of business processes into asynchronous workers, decreasing web server load, response times, and allowing for correct and complete handling of—for example—real-time updates coming from Facebook at up to 10,000 users/minute. Built a framework for distributed batch jobs running over arbitrary data sets using existing application code, lowering hardware requirements to a fraction of what they were and making batch jobs completely parallelizable, controllable, predictable and visible regardless of type (ad hoc, recurring), size or duration. Performed complete overhaul of infrastructure for 5M daily email sends, improving reliability and deliverability, and maintaining those improvements in the face of tightening restrictions from mail providers and a data center move. Created an AB testing framework to support simultaneous running and analysis of dozens of experiments, based on the testing papers from Microsoft (Kohavi et al) and Google. Deployed Redis as a bloom filter server, to allow efficient deduplication on very large data sets; made upstream contribution and extensive further additions (atomic check+add, TTL support) to Redis bloom filter Lua scripts based on papers by Almeida et al and Kirsch et al. Boosted developer efficiency and happiness in many ways; a sample: - Parallelized deployment scripts, making production pushes 8x faster, and added automated package management (Composer) and style checking (PHP_Codesniffer: one upstream contribution) to workflow and CI - Made numerous improvements to the unit testing framework to make testing easier, more valuable and less prone to breakage - Built a distributed scheduling framework and used it to unify scheduling of all messaging (email, Facebook notifications, mobile push notifications) - Presented or co-presented company talks on email systems, unix command-line tools, git and unit testing From January 2012 to December 2014 (3 years) Senior Engineer @ Led development for the launches of roubini.com and economonitor.com. Co-wrote a PHP framework featuring Spring-inspired dependency injection, a built-in service layer supporting both JSON and SOAP APIs, and caching using both APC and Memcached. Wrote the bulk of the application that we layered around a proprietary CMS to achieve all delivery-side functionality: subscriber account management and entitlements, social features, analytics and reporting, user-tailored email products, content syncing. Used Apache Solr for search functionality—took existing content import scripts and made them 10x faster while reducing disruption from re-indexing. Administered MySQL with replication using Percona Toolkit for online schema changes, consistency checks, etc. Wrote and consumed various types of feeds, APIs and SSOs with many 3rd parties like NBER, CEPR, Bloomberg, and the World Bank. Integrated subscriber entitlements with Sugar CRM used by the Roubini sales force. Wrote client-side JavaScript applications to streamline content editing by taking advantage of asynchronous service calls to CMS for our most rapidly-updated content, saving many person-years of editorial time. Supported by a Promise-based framework that notably enabled control over parallelized code, and Python/Django server-side API. Launched economonitor.com entirely on Rackspace's cloud, saving thousands of dollars in hosting fees per month. Wrote multiple WordPress plugins to migrate and taxonomize tens of thousands of existing blog posts from roubini.com as well as old posts from newly incoming bloggers joining economonitor.com. From February 2008 to January 2012 (4 years) Lead Developer @ Unified about a dozen separate content management systems under one object oriented PHP framework, cutting development time while preserving complete design flexibility. Dozens of sites including defjam.com, islandrecords.com, bonjovi.com and mariahcarey.com used this API and, combined, served an average of around 2 million page views/day. Improved scaling by adding a PHP output caching layer and database query caching layer along with tools for cache management. Built a JSON-RPC layer to allow sites built using said API to work transparently on remote PHP installations. Enhanced many sites and administrative applications with Ajax; islandrecords.com and defjam.com were both jQuery “featured sites”. Kept Ajax modular, simple and quick to deploy; many sites including islandrecords.com, bonjovi.com, falloutboyrock.com, islandurbanmusic.com, and mercuryrecords.com all used the same Ajax framework. From April 2005 to February 2008 (2 years 11 months)

Bachelor of Music, Music Performance (Jazz option) @ University of Nevada-Reno Richard Howard is skilled in: jQuery, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, JSON, AJAX, HTML, CSS, Apache, Git, Node.js, SQL, Web Development, Web Applications, Bash