Resume

For the most up-to-date resume, please contact me at ian.douglas@iandouglas.com

My Mottos:

• "I'm a programmer. I make things work, I don't make things pretty. If you want pretty, you want a web designer not a web developer."
• "Done is better than perfect."

Employment History:

1996, graduated from college in Canada, with a 3-year community college diploma specializing in embedded software development in C and Intel/Motorola Assembler.

May 1996 – Feb 1997, QNX Software Systems, Ottawa, tech support and sales application engineering.

1997, formed my own freelance LAMP development operation, working with dozens of clients and providing free LAMP advice to hundreds of people

Feb 1997 – Sept 1999, Telexis Corporation (now, March Networks), Ottawa, worked on various embedded systems, middleware applications, and end-user Windows applications.

Sept 1999 – May 2000, Chrysalis-ITS, Ottawa, worked on embedded software for a network card with built-in encryption support for things like SSL.

June 2000 – March 2004, iCreditVision, Los Angeles; LAMP development, secure data center management, security audits; continue to freelance for iCV today

March 2004 – March 2005, Online University of America; MySQL replication, VNC, revision control administration, Flash ActionScript 2.0, PHP/API publication

March 2005 – July 2006, PriceGrabber.com; Perl development, remodeled  their internal search engine algorithms and worked on other internal tools for importing merchant data.

July 2006 – Feb 2008, full-time freelance for clients such as the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and News Corp's "Fox Reality" tv show.

Feb 2008 -  Nov 2009, Rubicon Project; team lead role for 6 months; rebuilt core statistics/analytics data engine, scalability, fault tolerance, multi-threaded Perl

November 2009 – January 2010, freelance work, LAMP development

January 2010 – Present, ArmorGames.com, DevOps, LAMP development

Generalized/Witty commentary on my experience:

1993 Started in Computer Engineering Technology program at St Lawrence College, Kingston Ontario campus; focus on software development and firmware/embedded systems Learned C, Pascal, Assembler 

1995 First use of Linux as a desktop/workstation

1996 Graduated college, Computer Engineering Technology, St Lawrence College; focus on software development and firmware/embedded systems Learned HTML v3 and knew web development was my calling Introduced to Perl; instantly fell in love Decided a relational database like MySQL was more fitting than hand-built file storage I'd concocted for a client

1997 First use of Linux in a server environment, started my own web hosting company with two friends (wild98 web hosting)

1998 Visited Southern California for the first time since I was 4 years old. Knew this is where I wanted to grow old. Heard about a higher-level language called PHP; started tinkering with v3 while still in beta; learned it inside and out and rebuilt several of my Perl applications in PHP

2000 Moved to Southern California, first full time LAMP job; spent nearly 4 years managing a data center, network security, VPN and T1 setups for national credit agencies

2001 Designed my first network security audit setup; as of late 2010, Experian still can't break into that data center even though nobody's had to touch the code since I first wrote it. Learned about what SpamAssassin can do; decided to write a trainer script for it.

2002 Published my first Perl-based API for third-party developers to access our credit report systems

2004 Worked for a private university, learned tons of Flash AcrtionScript v2 programming and wrote my first API in PHP. Developed a love-hate relationship with Flash. My SpamAssassin Trainer was promoted as the "de facto standard" HOWTO guide at LunarPages for their cPanel users to block spam. 2005 Got a job working for a major online shopping comparison portal. Loved the job, hated the 2-hour commute. First time dabbling in tweaking the internals of search engine algorithms for a site handling about 18M users. 2006 Decided I had enough 'part-time' projects for various clients to go full-time in freelance mode. Loved the flexibility and pace, and helped a lot of companies.

2008 Figured if my wife and I were planning on having a family, I better take a full-time job with benefits, and worked at The Rubicon Project rebuilding their stats/analytics engine. First time tinkering with multi-threaded Perl and built my first horizontally-scalable architecture for a company which grew from 25M hits a day to over 1.3B (yes, Billion) per day. Decided working 60-80 hours every week, on call 24×7, for two years wasn't conducive to family life, and resigned on good terms. Miss that place, good people.

2010 Got into the video game industry by working at ArmorGames.com. Video game development on a Commodore 64 is what got me interested in software development when I was 8 years old, so this felt like a great opportunity. Now I'm re-applying skills learned at Rubicon about scalability to pull AG into a more 'social' aspect of gameplay. Good times.

Other skills I've picked up along the way:

Exposure: AJAX, Python, Google App Engine

Proficiency: CMS systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, and MVC architectures, like Zend Framework, Symfony and cakePHP