Rich Adams
Location
San Francisco, California, USA.
Objective
To solve interesting programming problems in areas such as high availability/critical systems, large dataset processing, interface design, web development and networking/internet technologies.
Skills
Languages:
Expert
- Java
- C++
- PHP
- (X)HTML 4/5
- CSS 2/3
- SQL
- *nix CLI
- XML
- Shell Scripting (Bash)
- JavaScript (incl AJAX/jQuery)
Experienced
- Python
- Perl
- Pascal (Delphi)
- ASP
- JSP
Tools:
- Primarily a Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) user, but also experienced with Windows.
- Experienced with various version control technologies; Git, SVN, CVS and Mercurial.
- Expert with MySQL, Oracle and memcached; administration and query optimisation.
- Well versed in web application security, W3C web standards, accessibility (WAI, colour blindness, screen readers), mobile websites and cross-browser compatibility.
- Good understanding of server operations and system architectures.
Experience
Sr. Systems Engineer
Gravity Mobile / Gracenote, Inc. / Sony USA
- Present
San Francisco, CA, USA
- Responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting all Gravity server applications and systems.
- Provide 24/7/365 on-call support for Gravity server infrastructure and applications.
- Primarily focussed on operations; administering backend server/database systems to ensure security and stability/uptime, MySQL maintenance (incl. replication), creating and configuring application VM instances, and maintenance of load balancer setup.
- Wrote Bash scripts and Java applications to fully automate server deployment and monitoring.
- Wrote and maintain extensive documentation on the entire system and application architecture.
- Wrote a variety Nagios plugins for monitoring/notifications and built a NOC display for Nagios.
- Performed a security review of Gravity systems/applications to ensure compliance with Gracenote Information Security directives and policies.
- Built the Gravity Mobile website (incl. mobile version) from designs provided by the design team.
- Data centre experience; performed various hardware upgrades, racked and cabled a new server, and cabled fibre to all existing Gravity Mobile servers.
- Amazon web services (AWS) experience; launched and configured several applications on EC2, utilizing S3 to store assets. Planned the migration of a large application from Gravity's infrastructure - Involved re-designing the architecture to utilise EC2, RDS, SQS, IAM, S3, CloudFront and ElastiCache, to be highly-available, fault tolerant and scalable.
Software Development Engineer
Amadeus Services Ltd.
-
Heathrow Airport, UK
- Senior C++ developer on the Baggage Team for Airline IT - Departure Control Systems.
- Responsible for design and development of a new baggage sortation messaging framework.
- Heavily involved in airline cut-overs, ranging from small/domestic to large/international airlines.
- Constructed a variety of internal monitoring and investigative tools using Java & PHP, in my spare time.
- Maintained other internal tools written in Perl, Python and Ruby.
- Attended airline face-to-face meetings as the Amadeus baggage expert.
- Primary and secondary production on-call as needed, resolving production issues in real-time.
- Acting Unit Manager of the Baggage Team during Unit Manager's absence, and for a 12 week transition period between managers in late 2009.
Support Administrator (Volunteer)
LiveJournal Inc.
-
Worked Remotely
- Provided technical support for a website with over 2 million active global users.
- Oversaw all volunteers in the Style Systems category - approved answers and evaluated progress - and reported in to paid staff.
- Developed a Firefox add-on to increase the efficiency of responding to support requests.
- Beta-tested new website features, reported bugs, and provided feedback.
Web Developer
Nutratech Ltd.
-
York, UK
- Designed and developed new features for the Nutracheck website, and converted existing content to valid semantic code using W3C standards.
- Wrote various back-end areas of the website using Java/JSP on Tomcat.
- Custom built the front-end of an open source forum to use on the website, now used by several other related websites.
Guest Assistant
VUE Cinemas
-
York, UK
Web Developer, Chief Projectionist, Producer & Editor (Volunteer)
York Student Cinema
-
York, UK
- Volunteer for over 3 years in various roles.
- Produced and edited the termly publication "Exposure!", a bound 32-page colour magazine containing reviews for upcoming films.
- Held several technical roles such as Chief Projectionist and Chief Technician.
Freelance Web Developer
Self-Employed
-
York and London, UK
- Designed and developed several small - medium websites for a variety of clients over a 4 year period using both (X)HTML/CSS and PHP/MySQL.
- Primarily worked with the LAMP stack of software.
- Specialised in cross-browser compatibility and writing W3C standards compliant code.
Web Developer and Technical Support
Adams Russell Ltd.
-
Worked Remotely
- Designed and implemented the website and provided ongoing technical support.
- Developed a client database application using Delphi and Microsoft Access.
- Upgraded and added further developments to their in-house financial planning software.
- Provided technical guidance and assistance in upgrading computer systems.
Data Entry Clerk
Total Home Entertainment
- , - , -
Chesterton, UK
Sales Assistant
Superdrug Stores Plc.
-
Newcastle-Under-Lyme, UK
Work Experience (Technical Support & Graphic Design)
Newcastle-Under-Lyme County Council
Newcastle-Under-Lyme, UK
Education
Master of Engineering (Hons) in Computer Systems and Software Engineering
University of York, England (2003 - 2007)
Interests
Networks and Distributed Systems, Evolutionary Algorithms, Constraint Programming, and Principles of Unconventional Programming.
Group Project (A grade)
Internal Submarine Vessel Communication System (Set by Thales Underwater Systems)
- Designed and implemented the user interface for our solution in C++.
- Created and maintained the Subversion repository used by my team.
- Gave a presentation to Thales Underwater Systems regarding the UI design decisions.
Masters Project (A grade)
"Music Recommendation using Collaborative Filtering with Similarity Fusion" Download Report
- Developed a recommendation engine combining the two main forms of collaborative filtering.
- Created server-side of project in PHP to collect and store listening information from users.
- Built a Java GUI to display recommendations and visualise why they had been made.
- Users were able to adjust the data in real-time to produce new recommendations.
Interests
My main hobbies revolve around my love of films, music, photography, climbing, travelling and ice hockey.
In my free time I like to play piano and enjoy reading comedy from such authors as Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I regularly read articles on particle physics and astronomy as I have a strong interest in scientific reading. I am also currently learning Cantonese ( 广东话 ), attending a few evening classes and working in my own time using online materials and text books.