Resume for Nick Sullivan - Web Software Architect

In my idealistic view, the goal of a computer programmer is to teach computers how to understand people. The better job I can do with this, the happier I am with my work. I enjoy thinking about how people think, and building software to make people's lives easier.

Technology passions include:

• Scaling - I love making things go fast, finding out how to distribute load across clusters for availability and performance, and troubleshooting performance problems. I'm looking for a company with performance related challenges.
• LAMP environments - I enjoy working with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. And even though it doesn't fit well within the acronym, I've been using Squid and memcached a lot lately too.
• Ad Optimization - I have generated millions of dollars in revenue for companies I've worked at by improving the delivery, relevance, speed, and performance of ads
• Text search - Web searches, job searches, resume searches, text processing, website spidering, regular expressions, text categorization, thesauruses, sentence processing, numeric pattern matching. Yum.
• Geographic software - I have experience with geocoding, radius searches, geographic targeting, and the 'Paris' problem.

I'm a seasoned technology professional with 10+ years of web-based development experience that spans the full range of the product, from the original concept to a large-scale rollout. I have experience leading development, user interface, and systems administration teams, but prefer to keep my hands on the code! I have a unique blend of strong communication skills, intelligence, and passion that makes for a key person in a technology company.

An Ad Network Optimization company that started as an internal project at Wikia. See a Liftium for more info.

Helped form the Senior Management team at Wikia, where as a team we overhauled Wikia's development process to deliver high quality product in an efficient manner.

Accepted responsibility for monetization of the remnant revenue. Conceived, architected, and built an Ad Network Optimizer when we found the existing solutions in the marketplace didn't meet our needs. After conservatively doubling Wikia's revenue and helping the company become cash flow positive, we decided that it was worthy of a standalone, focused effort, so it was spun off as a separate company (Liftium) with me as it's founder and CEO.

Lead a small team of high quality talent to deliver improvements to Wikia's website. Solved difficult scaling problems, built a Javascript API for Mediawiki, implemented DART, Google Ad Manager, and other Ad Serving products.

Working on the company's #1 priority, I architected a new platform called User Location Platform (ULP), which will serve to help content and advertising to users based on their location.

When rolled out, this platform will service more than 40 billion transactions per day, in less than 10 milliseconds, and will be responsible for more than 800 million dollars a year in revenue for Yahoo!

Architecture for User Location Platform involved technical design, exploration of various technologies, prototyping, benchmarking, hardware ordering and estimation, documentation and authoring technical specifications for the C++ developers. It also required significant knowledge and understanding of methodologies for geo-targeting content for users.

Service Engineering, Infrastructure, PHP, Perl, feed processing, Architectural planning for Yahoo! News, the largest News site online.
While I only worked with Yahoo! News for 5 months before being selected for a new role within Yahoo!, I helped in accomplishing three key initiatives:

• Contextual Shortcuts on Yahoo! News stories (mouseover div popups with related information for keywords)
• Flickr Integration with Yahoo! News stories
• Formed and lead a new group labeled the Infrastructure Group -- to solve technical infrastructure challenges permanently and completely instead of applying temporary solutions

Highly leveraged the Mediawiki platform to create a top notch site for information about investing. My role includes search technology, PHP expertise, and system administration, squid, and SEO.

Technology leader; from writing code to establishing standards and making technology decisions. Architected and built suites of web-based applications that interact to form an integrated product that powers companies such as Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and News Corporation. The product is internationalized and localized in 7 languages, powers hundreds of client websites, delivers over 100 million page views a month, and generates millions of dollars per year in revenue.

In addition to the role of Chief Software Architect, I've had hiring and management responsibility for the developers, user interface team, systems administrators, and IT. I prefer to spend most of my time developing solutions to the most challenging problems.

My first major goal was to transform the company from a custom software development company into an ASP (application service provider), which meant a centralized code base with customizable features, look and feel, and text. This enabled the company to scale effectively to hundreds of clients with less effort and expense. Various tools were built, providing a private-label solution that enables media companies to have an online job board. I architected, built, and/or supervised the following:

For employers:

• Job Posting Tools - online job posting forms, including e-commerce and cross posting to other sites
• Applicant Management Tools - online folders to organize candidates, screening questions to filter applicants
• Resume Searching - search for candidates via keywords, skills, location, and other fielded data

For job seekers:

• Job Searching - tools for job seekers to search for jobs using keywords, location (including radius), category, etc.
• Online Resume Posting - including copy/paste, upload a Word document or PDF, or use a resume builder tool
• Saved Searches / E-mailed Alerts - job searches can be saved for later use, and optionally have the results e-mailed on a regular basis
• RSS feeds - users can receive their job search results via an RSS feed

Back-end administration systems:

• Classified feed processing - automated processes that accept incoming feeds of classified ads and process them for viewing/searching online
• Wrapping - tools for automatic spidering of job postings from employment web sites. I pioneered an entirely new way of handling such that process efficiencies were increased 10 fold.

The next major goal for the business was to expand into the Autos and Real Estate verticals. This was accomplished in a very short amount of time to meet business goals. It also presented some key technology challenges. I architected, built, and/or managed the following.

Autos:

• Auto comparison tools - using an xml based web service from Chrome Auto Data users can compare features, photos, and see movies for up to 10 different vehicles. Sample
• New Car Configurator - allow you to select new car features, color, and options online. Sample
• Integration of external data - Edmunds.com, Cobalt, Chrome, eVox, Kelly Blue Book, New Car Test Drive, and other data providers

Real estate:

• Integration with Google Maps - For home buyers to see search results in map format
• Integration with Century 21 - Enabling all of Century 21's properties to be searchable on Real Estate Journal
• Processing photos - automatically convert any incoming image to a jpg suitable for web use

Architected, built, and oversaw the development of bikestore.com, the leading bicycling website that included:

• Searchable database of mountain bike trails, with radius
• Meta search that allowed you to search all cycling websites with one search
• Online directory of local bicycle stores
• Architected a B2B solution that was to integrate with major bicycle manufacturers

We had a short time to build and develop the site. We worked very long hours, and with my efforts, we launched the site within two weeks of my hiring date. I built a team, and mentored two junior developers, and lead the system/network administration efforts for the company.

Started as a junior programmer, and became the lead of the group after 4 months. Key accomplishments include:

• Took over and maintained control of all mission-critical technical processes for the brassring.com
• Renovated a manual job posting process into a smooth running automated one that was much more efficient
• Re-factored the entire site, to facilitate a new branding strategy
• The company needed a content management system, and had selected autonomy for the job. I wrote an in house replacement that accomplished management goals and resulted in a savings of $100,000.

• PHP - Object oriented PHP, libraries, extensions, acceleration, scaling, PEAR, Symfony framework, command line scripts, image creation/manipulation, Mediawiki customization, YPHP, Database abstraction layers
• Linux/Unix - bash scripting, server architecture, monitoring, 24X7 support, load balancing, high availability, firewalls, perforce, subversion, backups, co-location, content delivery networks, reverse proxy with squid
• MySQL - Database design, performance tuning, InnoDB, MyISAM, full text indexing, replication, mysql cluster, backups
• Texis/Vortex - (Text searching RDBMS) - Fuzzy text search applications, web site robots, dynamic text categorization
• XML/XSL - Data processing, SOAP, xml-rpc, customization and i18n of presentation layer, web services, DOM manipulation
• HTML/CSS/Javascript - Forms, Enterprise CSS, form validation, YUI, AJAX, JSON
• Squid - HTTP headers, configuration, architecture, reverse proxying, load balancing.

Solid relationships, built on trust, are critical for any successful business. Here are what some of the people I have worked with have to say. In chronological order. Contact information available upon request.