:: Simon Wistow [ Details ] o Address : 300 Beale Street #318, San Francisco, CA, 94105, USA o Email : simon@thegestalt.org o Telephone : +1 415-420-0480 o References : available on request [ Profile ] I am an accomplished developer with 12 years experience and have programmed professionally in Perl, C, C++, Java, Python and Ruby, specializing in infrastructure and pipeline programming and R&D for highly scaled systems. I am a quick learner and am able to rapidly pick up new code bases, languages and paradigms. I enjoy the process of taking an idea from vague concept and rapidly iterating to a proof of concept and onto a workable solution. I have experience of working in environments ranging from small start-ups to multinationals and am well versed in leading small to medium sized inter disciplinary teams. I am looking for a senior engineering position within a cutting edge organization to continue being challenged with new and interesting problems and to use my experience to create a better development environment. [ Experience ] o Senior Search Engineer, Scribd San Francisco, (June 2009-present) Scribd is the leading hosted document website with over 60 million users and documents. - designed, built and managed a search engine currently handling several hundred gigabytes of text and designed to scale to over a terabyte. - created system to efficiently match incoming documents against stored queries and alert users when new matches happened. o Senior Search Engineer/Senior Backend Engineer, Six Apart San Francisco, (August 2006-June 2009) Six Apart runs one of the largest hosted blogging platforms in the world. - wrote and maintained search engine for LiveJournal, Vox and TypePad. It was capable of handling over 20 updates a second and scaling to 3 billion items. - wrote a near real time content aggregation system that inferred which inferred a user's various accounts round the web, and normalised and annotated content. - wrote the majority of the backend system for Motion, a product that allowed a client to host the front-end for a social network on their own site but with content hosted on SixApart's servers. o Senior R&D Pipeline Engineer, The Moving Picture Company London, (November 2003-August 2006) The Moving Picture Company is a leading Post Production facility. - worked on a Python based high-level language to allow us to abstractly script our pipeline and render farm tasks in order to allow code and knowledge reuse whilst abstracting away details such as the renderer and queue manager used. - wrote a system designed to allow easy software releases. It catalogued all packages released through it and automated building, testing and deployment of software under a multi-language, multi-architecture, multi-operating system environment. - was asked to look at the current engineering process and consolidate the production pipeline in order to facilitate code reuse and allow tighter integration of teams working on different shows. This involved writing a comprehensive white paper including a detailed change management plan and job specs for new roles. - completed a reorganisation of the entire code base bringing it under effective, consolidated revision control and attempting to eliminate duplication of effort and ensure that all current units compile. - wrote a custom file browser that was tightly integrated with the company's pipeline and working methodology. This included efficient handling of large, non-contiguous sequences of files as single entities and the ability to launch different versions of applications depending on the job, shot and scene. - built a GNU/Linux based set-top box capable of full screen DVD quality play back. This involved, amongst other things, working on hardware MPEG decoding (on the EPIA M II motherboard using the CLE266 Unichrome chip). - automated the previously manual processes involved in importing stop frame animation assets from films such as Wallace and Gromit and The Corpse Bride into our system. This involved analysing EDLs, cut lists and neg logs and highlighted missing or corrupted data. The suite of tools included conform preparation utilities and a search system for frames and sequences. - wrote a library capable of generating dailies from sequences of images. The code used dynamically loaded plugins to allow multiple input and output formats (DPX, OpenEXR, Quicktime, DivX). It also took care of gamma transforms, linear/logarithmic mapping, resizing and framing based on various broadcast formats, slates and burns. Amongst other things it automatically generated dailies every night for every shot currently being worked on. This gave much producers much better overall vision of the current state of production and significantly lightened the load on the Data Operators. - trained other programmers on development techniques such as correct use of revision control systems and unit testing as well as on less traditional skills such as usability and information architecture. o Senior Search Engineer, Yahoo! Europe London, (October 2002 - November 2003) Part of a small team responsible for running Yahoo Search in 9 countries: - was one of a five person team that orchestrated the move from the original Yahoo! Directory to 100% crawl based results. - implemented word blocking to meet territory-specific regulatory requirements. - created a DSL to ease moving sensitive data from indexers to globally distributed front end servers. - led Yahoo! Europe 4.0 redesign teams project managers, designers, engineers and QA located throughout Europe. - implemented spelling correction and suggestion engine for 9 languages. o Various London, (pre-2002) - Details available on request. [ Other Activities ] I am an active open source developer, including many Perl CPAN modules. I was leader of the London Perl Mongers, one of the largest grassroots computing user groups. I have spoken at conferences including OSCON, AIGA, Dorkbot, the London Design Council and the ASIST Information Architecture conference. In addition I have organized several conferences including Open Tech, YAPC::Europe and the London Perl Workshop. My hobbies include snowboarding, Krav Maga, climbing, scuba diving and collecting rare console games. I am a volunteer NERT (Neighbourhood Emergency Response Team) and am trained in CPR. [ Education ] BEng Computing Science (Hons), Imperial College, 2000