MICHAEL J. ABBOTT
Unix Server Software Architect & Performance Optimist
www.repbot.org/mike
mikerepbot.org

OBJECTIVE

SUMMARY

• Technical architect experienced with multi-petabyte distributed storage systems, 24/7 production operations, high-performance multi-threaded distributed 64-bit real-time server software development and system-wide performance tuning.
• 26 years experience with C and Unix, especially networking and file systems.
• 19 years experience with multi-threaded programming and multiprocessor systems.
• 10 years experience with C++ and object-oriented programming.
• 5 years experience with Perl.

PORTFOLIO

• Open Source Projects: State Threads Library and Accelerating Apache Project.
• U.S. Patents: 5,751,280, 5,973,679, 6,654,933, 6,941,508, and 7,272,780 regarding streaming media.
• Samples: Code and technical documentation, available on-line.

RECENT EXPERIENCE

Apple, Cupertino, California    March 2008 - present
Server Software Engineer
Contributed to the quality of Mac OS X Server.

Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, California    April 2003 - December 2007
Technical Architect
Managed, enhanced, and streamlined the distributed storage system supporting Yahoo! Photos, Briefcase, Groups, Shopping, Personals, and 40 other properties as it grew from tens of terabytes in one farm to several petabytes in dozens of farms around the world, serving a billion files a day to hundreds of millions of users.

• Designed, implemented, and documented hundreds of improvements to increase scalability, reliability, usefulness, and performance while reducing expenditures on capital and operations. Charted a long-term worldwide growth strategy. Identified and redesigned underperforming system components. Evaluated new hardware and strategized with hardware vendors. Refined the system into a mature managed storage service, easy for new properties to join.
• Led a team of up to six engineers and operators developing and maintaining the storage service. Introduced, assigned, and prioritized tasks while balancing the complex, competing business requirements of our client properties. Liaised with scores of other teams. Trained new team members. Instituted policies of sharing information and of documenting history, procedures, and best practices.
• Held ultimate authority and responsibility for 24/7 production operations of this storage service, safeguarding millions of dollars of revenue. Served routinely as the primary pageable on-call contact. Regularly audited configuration, security, backups, and performance. Devised and refined dozens of continuous historical data plots and extrapolations using open source software. Simplified, automated, documented, and outsourced operations whenever possible. Investigated complaints escalated from customer care. Mined content and access patterns for business intelligence.
• Managed the relentless, exponential growth of the amount of content stored. Collected growth data, projected trends, and predicted bursts. Planned capacity expansion and ordered tens of millions of dollars of hardware for just-in-time deployment. Presented and defended hardware orders and system architecture to executive review boards. Shepherded install tickets through the many stages of installation by disparate service groups.
• Significantly reduced the incremental cost of storage while considering capacity, reliability, density, power consumption, speed, and the ease and cost of operations. Reduced the number of servers per unit of storage by over 90%. Created and implemented a framework for transparently compressing stored content to reduce storage and save millions of dollars more. Deployed multiple tiers of storage farms based on different hardware platforms to meet the various business needs of the properties and to minimize cost.
• Conceived, implemented, and deployed a complete system of automatic fault detection, isolation, mitigation, and failover across geographically disperse data centers. Met the highest corporate standards for business continuity planning and high availability for mission-critical properties.
• Served as the primary security contact for nine properties. Conducted biannual compliance reviews of those properties. Improved, proselytized, and enforced security policies. Improved the prevention, detection, and remediation of abuse.

CacheFlow, Sunnyvale, California    October 2001 - April 2002
Senior Software Engineer
Developed a high-performance access logging subsystem for a next-generation web accelerator until the product was cancelled.

Silicon Graphics (SGI), Mountain View, California    July 1993 - October 2001
Broadcast Server Developer    June 2001 - October 2001
Contributed to the quality of SGI's Media Servers for Broadcast and helped design their next generation.

Streaming Media Optimizer    December 2000 - June 2001
Single-handedly quintupled the number of real-time media streams a given Irix system could serve. Prototyped an Arsenic-inspired user-level Gigabit Ethernet driver and other high-performance, low-latency interfaces for transmitting real-time media over a network.

Apache Project Contributor    November 1998 - January 2001
Single-handedly increased the performance of the open source Apache HTTP server 900% as measured by the SPECweb96 benchmark and 200% as measured by SPECweb99. Ported Apache to SGI's 64-bit ABI. Created the Accelerating Apache Open Source Project.

Brightmail NSPR Port Project Leader    July - October 1999
Led two other SGI engineers in developing an operating system abstraction layer based on Mozilla's NSPR and porting Brightmail's anti-spam mail server to it. Delivered complete, tested, documented package on schedule. Published a derivative work as the State Threads Library Open Source Project.

Web Server Benchmarking Project Leader    September 1998 - December 2000
Measured and increased the performance of various HTTP servers on various platforms. Maintained a web server benchmarking lab. Contributed to SPEC Web subcommittee meetings and SPECweb99 development. Authored the initial version of SGI's Web Server Tuning Guide.

Everest Initiative Project Leader    October 1997 - August 1998
Led one other SGI engineer in more than tripling the performance of Netscape's FastTrack web server on Irix and captured the SPECweb96 world record. Granted all source code changes back to Netscape on schedule.

See 16 more years of experience history on my full résumé.

EDUCATION

SKILLS AND INTERESTS

My family, model trains, model rocketry, pipe organs, pervasive social computing, ethnic foods, chocolate.

rev Apr 2008