Steven : Andrew : Hazel

email: sah@awesame.org

.plan

    I'm currently working on a stealth-mode software company.


buzzword compliance

gigs
    BitTorrent, Inc. February 2006 - October 2007

    As Client Product Manager (4 months):

    • Moving out of the engineering department for the first time in my career, I guided the releases of BitTorrent 6.0 and BitTorrent's forums.

    As Director, Engineering (14 months):

    • Coordinated the consumer engineering team (about eight engineers) to build BitTorrent's P2P-delivery-based movie store, as well as two major revisions of a self-publishing product.
    • Expanded the consumer engineering team to meet increasing product and maintentance demands.
    • Established a rapid bi-weekly release schedule, and instituted improved revision control and bug tracking processes.

    As Senior Software Engineer (2 months):

    • Co-authored a high-performance BitTorrent tracker in C++ using boost::asio.
    • Helped design and write BitTorrent versions 4.20 through 5.0.9 (in Python, using coroutines for concurrency).


    Senior Software Engineer, Grouper Networks, Inc. September 2004 - January 2006
    At Grouper, I designed and wrote major components of a P2P file sharing application in C#. My most significant contribution was a BitTorrent-like swarming download system to facilitate YouTube-style web-based video sharing.

    Grouper was acquired by Sony Pictures in 2006, and is now known as Crackle.



    Software Engineer, HOTorNOT 2004
    Working closely with the HOTorNOT founders, I built and ran a small quiz-building web app using Apache, PHP, and MySQL. I did all the technical stuff: programming, page layout, system administration, etc.

    After that, I designed and wrote a multi-player online game server in Python, using libevent for scalability.



    Software Engineer, FolderShare 2002 - 2003
    After Audiogalaxy imploded, the founders started another company and hired me to work on their new project. We released FolderShare in May, 2002. I was responsible for a significant portion of all major components of the system through the first several releases, including:

    • A secure, distributed server to broker file transfers and change tracking between clients (in C, using the /dev/epoll interface for fast I/O).
    • The FolderShare client, for which I implemented rsync-protocol peer-to-peer file transfers, as well as basic web server functionality.
    • The FolderShare website, written using Apache, PHP, and MySQL.
    • Encypted client-server and peer-to-peer communications (using OpenSSL), and the associated PKI.

    FolderShare was acquired by Microsoft in 2005.



    Software Engineer, Audiogalaxy 2001 - 2002
    Tom Kleinpeter and I rewrote the Audiogalaxy file sharing system's distributed server in C, using Linux's /dev/epoll. It ran on a couple hundred server machines and ultimately coordinated over a million simultaneous connections.

    After that, I wrote a system to generate artist recommendations ("Other listeners liked..." lists) for the Audiogalaxy web site.

    I also worked with Tom to write a metadata-based content filtering system. It was probably the most accurate content filtering system ever deployed in a peer-to-peer file sharing application, but it still didn't work so well.

    Then I worked on the Unix and MacOS X versions of a new Audiogalaxy client, in C and Objective-C. Shortly before we could release them, though, the RIAA sued Audiogalaxy. They settled out of court, and most of Audiogalaxy was shut down. So I was let go.



    Contributor, The Freenet Project 1999 - 2002
    Freenet is a censorship-resistant P2P publishing system. I was a regular on the Freenet development mailing list for years, and I wrote a bunch of Freenet-related code, including a Freenet protocol library in C, a once-popular key index, in Perl, and a Freenet web proxy, also in Perl.

    In connection with this work, Brandon Wiley and I wrote a paper, in which we presented some of our early ideas about tailoring Distributed Hash Tables for use in censorship-resistant publishing systems. Brandon presented the paper at IPTPS'02.



    Earlier Work 1995 - 2000
    • At Trilogy, I produced weekly software builds, handled source code escrow, and administrated a bunch of machines running Windows NT and various flavors of Unix.
    • At InCircuit, I wrote networked apps for hand-held barcode scanners like the ones you see at the supermarket.
    • My first hacking job was with a small company that wrote PC software for use with industrial process control systems. I wrote an object oriented database, and a scripting language for stored proceedures. I also got my first exposure to Lisp while playing with a fancy expert system. I was extremely lucky to start out with such a great job!



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