Resume

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

My Motto: “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.”

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
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

Generalized/Witty commentary on my experience:

Generalized Skills:

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 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 2009, 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
Right around the corner… we’ll see what happens next.

Other skills I’ve picked up along the way:

Exposure:
AJAX, Python, Ruby

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