Christopher E. Lane 849 Corlista Drive San Jose, CA 95128 1-301-270-6524 chris@disputingtaste.com Qualifications in Brief: * As a technology leader that codes actively, I bring my dirty hands to the leadership areas to make sure decisions are factual and likely to be useful in practice; I bring the larger perspective of the company goals married to the efficient, maintainable, and agile way to build systems throughout an organization, to enhance the common vision and reduce avoidable errors and speed up the pace of development. I have lead and finished many projects once thought impossible, writing code only when others cannot or will not. If I don't find large savings or massive improvements in efficiency or reliability, it's a sad quarter for me. I show others how to stay calm and optimistic under all conditions - we can do anything, it's just bits on disks. Specific areas of expertise: * Design: finding the doable large changes to make systems better or cheaper; development and deployment of robust, scalable and highly-available network servers for on-line consumer products. Experienced at translating product features into cost-effective, maintainable and operable systems. Experienced at programmatically managing scarce resources. * Code: Go, c, c++, gcc/emacs/gdb environment, Python, Java/Eclipse, Common Lisp, R, node.js, and other programming. Threaded and unthreaded (event driven) environments. * Modernization - upgraded a number of old software components (SSL libraries from 0.9 OpenSSL to 1.0.1 OpenSSL, OS (RHEL5 to Ubuntu16) across large and unruly legacy fleet. * Math - I keep investigating numbers, and am often to the first person in an org to see the numbers showing some pattern that makes our next steps blindingly obvious. * Testing: Found many opportunities to enhance managed stage test environment, bringing up reliability from 1 9 to 2 9s. Laid a framework for the Test SRE team to hit 3 9s with. * Monitoring: Wrote several data collectors. Part of team that designed and implemented syslog/Kakfa/Spark near-real time monitoring system. * Web protocols: TCP & UDP, HTTP, SSL, SOAP. Experienced at development of efficient binary protocols for massive client/server and server/server deployment. Also JSON. * Encryption: Designed and implemented (in various languages and environments) an improving series of encryption protocols and key management schemes for a web gateway. Brought SSL resumption to several areas to decrease latency and latency variability. * Troubleshooting: diagnosing and finding timely solutions to operational problems in distributed high availability/high volume networking environment. Deep knowledge of UNIX process and network behavior. Diagnosis of dynamically unstable systems (infinite loops, inappropriate retry strategies, irregular latency profiles). Enabled many PayPal releases to be fixed forward rather than rolled-back. * DB: SQL programming and DB design (Oracle, Sybase and MySQL). Much experience with designing in-memory caching for various databases, including delay Qs and other means to protect important but vulnerable back-ends. Deep experience with the implications of dynamic behavior of systems. Have used MongoDB and Reddis and Spanner. Technical Work Experience: Principal Member Technical Staff, PayPal Inc. September, 2008 - Present Test Environments: Helped trouble-shooting network and performance issues during migrate on premise system to GCP. Migrated 70K production VMs and test environment from very old OS to modern OS. SSL Resumption to increase performance. Monitoring: Defined requirements to move system towards more statistically sophisticated methods; wrote and handed off several packages to enable data collection endpoints for database, messaging, and networking groups. Worked on new monitoring stack, bringing live a Syslog -> Kafka -> Spark -> Druid stack for realtime monitoring of incoming web/API traffic to the company. Application Security: Worked on encryption agent and then upgraded C++ OpenSSL library fleet wide without availbility hits. Frameworks: Worked on Java frameworks tooling, and then joined the Python frameworks team, hardening the Python stack for server usage. Implemented low level logging, stress tests, high load testing framework and CI setup. Helped a number of Product teams deploy TensorFlow applications to our docker deploy environment. Release Integration: Founded code review/integration department to ensure PayPal code shows the disciplines needed in a distributed environment. Built workflow tools using node.js and python (integrating with trac, Skype, email, CQ, and git). Saved many major releases from being rolled back, through quick diagnosis of operational problems, quick location of code changes responsible, and finding feasible work around. Brought many smart but inexperienced developers into deeper awareness of how unix does work and should work. Fixed various wire protocols to be easier to change. Payment systems maintenance programmer. Provided coding, bug-diagnosing, and consultation services to PayPal development staff on stand-in payment system. Developed a number of monitoring and exploration tools. Evangelized for more robust architectures and implementation methods. Demonstrated using UNIX tools to discover root causes of performance or functional problems. Developed a slew of personal tools to navigate large and poorly isolated c++ code base. Deleted a large number of unused components and code. Learned the payments processing application domain (more strict about eventual reconciliation than the IM space). Principal Software Engineer, AOL, May, 1996 - October, 2005 Designed statistically aware monitoring system for data center early warning system. Created Python/MySQL DB data gatherer and R statistic programming language analyzer. Wrote data loading server to encrypt 100 Million passwords in AIM user database without disrupting normal operation of the database. Implemented code to dynamically convert AIM authentication data from flat file to Sybase conversion; oversaw the conversation process. Architected alerts system for AOL. Implemented core host server matching events with alerts. This project went from my idea in 1999 to a platform that in 2005, delivered about 6000 alerts/second at peak, 10 Million/day, for about 10 distinct AOL products, with about 15 programmers working on various aspects; these products touched a wide variety of legacy data-stores and clients, all of which where exposed in a simple and uniform alerts interface, providing IM to SMS; client pop-ups, reminder emails, breaking news alerts, AOL TV alerts, wireless device alerts. This server provided extensive information about on-line and offline users, filtering of occasionally bad live stock data, graceful degradation in face of failing other servers. Unlike most of AOLs on-line system, this was not simply a request/respond system, it read user preferences ahead of time and matched them against live data feeds and then took configurable action, and also allowed users to sign up for alerts based on certain data feeds at certain times (times specified in user understandable format, not time_t's). Developed several frameworks for load and functional testing. Developed "evil network" testing methodology which supplemented standard networking libraries with code that would randomly alter various bits, bytes or sequences; discovered many bugs in network parsing code, even very old and trusted code. I hold three patents related to the alerts system (7,624,172, 7,496,631 & 7,363,345). Designed, wrote and maintained numerous servers to support the AOL Instant Messenger product and various AOL web products that share the AIM name-space: HTTP server that functions as generic gateway between web and proprietary network, servicing several million hits per day for AOLs first web registration system, web authentication systems, ICQ chat interface and others; very easy API for units with back-end functionality to expose to HTTP aware partners; provided customer engineering support to said partners for registration functionality (up to and including SSHing into their computer to fix their Perl scripts). Back-end server and web UI (including multi-threaded C library implementing a simple file descriptor like API to send/receive delimited messages) to allow security operations to administer AIM database safely and easily. Wrote server to perform all authentication for aol.com logins. Maintained several networking, encryption, and database libraries used company-wide. Performed several re-architectures of crufty systems. AOL side of Netcenter/AIM namespace harmonization project. Education: Advanced c/Unix programming class and Advanced Programming Languages class at University of Maryland, University College, Spring, 1997. Duke University, Durham, NC. B.S. May, 1990. Major: Mathematics. 11 upper level math classes. Additional course work in Computer Science (Pascal Programming, Digital Design and Artificial Intelligence). Average: 3.5 on a 4.0 Scale in major. Year Abroad at Oxford University, in math. Received College Prize for excellence in studies. Programming incessantly since sixth grade.