Jon Frisby

Email: jfrisby@mrjoy.com
Cell: 408-898-7702
Location: Oakland, CA

Goals

Looking to help build and organize a small team into a powerful instrument for the business.

Community Involvement

Original Open Source Projects

• sparkle_motion - Generative event lighting in Ruby with Philips Hue and Novation LaunchPad.
• UnityColorBlindness - A tool to let game developers experience their Unity3D games through the eyes of someone with any of a number of forms of typical color perception (“color blindness”).
• UnityREPL - An interactive C# shell (based on Mono.CSharp.dll) for Unity3D.
• UnityGUIExtensions - Extend Unity3D’s IMGUI with things such as resizeable horizontal/vertical split-panes.

Technical Stuff

• Areas of Expertise: Web, Distributed Systems, Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing, ETL, 2D/3D Game Development, Security, DevOps
• Languages: Ruby, Go, C#, JavaScript
• Frameworks/Tools: Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, SideKiq, Etc.
• Data Stores: Postgres, MySQL, Redis

Experience

As the Head of Engineering for an agency ambitious to become a self-service platform, I worked to support the Data Science team through excellence in engineering practices. As we were a small organization with limited resources, I took a player/coach approach, building one leg of the new system myself.

• Hired and managed a small team (1 front-end, 1 data) of excellent engineers
• Established appropriate best-practices around coding, security, operations, and project management (incl. Kanban and Scrum)
• Helped pay down higher-risk elements of technical debt through standardization, automation, and documentation while maintaining feature implementation velocity
• Worked with data science / product to help understand requirements and define transition from agency to self-service platform using modern, performant technologies
• Oversaw implementation of blazing-fast React-based front-end (served via a static site via S3/CloudFront)
• Oversaw implementation of next-generation Python-based data platform
• Implemented GraphQL API, admin systems/workflows, and Facebook synchronization using Ruby on Rails / Devise/ ActiveAdmin / GraphiQL / SideKiq / Postgres
• Helped investigate, understand, and work around the many quirks of the Facebook Marketing API
• Provided education around git and other tools, as needed to support and enable the data science team

As part of the Flex “startup-within-a-startup”, I worked to help the company explore the opportunities around contingent employment, in order to expand its reach, grow revenue, and establish a more versatile base in a changing economy.

• Built integrations for the #1 and #2 VMS vendors (platforms used by employers that utilize large numbers of contingent workers)
  • This included candidate-facing features, internal workflow features, and cross-system integration
• Developed new features for contract employees using the Hired platform
• Tech stack included Ruby on Rails, SideKiq, ActiveAdmin, and Postgres
• Worked on-site with #2 VMS vendor to improve communication and ensure timely delivery

Provisioning Team

• Streamlined “User Access Request” process, reducing the amount of complexity for users and making the system easier to iterate on
• Led “How we Role” effort to implement RBAC mechanisms, manageable by individual team leads
  • Previous system was ad-hoc, involving Jira tickets and manual effort
  • LDAP roles were not feasible for individual team leads to manage because of their centralized nature
  • Worked with the organization to establish an incremental path from this to an automated, self-service-per-team system properly integrated with LDAP
• Took a software engineer intern, and provided guidance to help make him a net-positive contributor
• Helped several ops people “level up” their coding abilities
• Refactored and shored up numerous smaller operational tools and components
• Implement chat-bot (in Ruby, using Lita.io) to aid in providing operational support to other teams

Tools Team

• Fixed brittle Golang test suite, making it clearer / easier to work with, and safe to run in randomized order
• Shored up project setup process for several codebases, reducing onboarding friction and easing mobility across teams
• Simplified and fixed serious bugs in nascent IP address management system, making it easier for other engineers to iterate on

As the sole DevOps/security engineer, I was responsible for the maintenance and operation of a high-traffic, consumer-use VPN at the heart of the business. This VPN gathered 50+GiB/day of consumer network traffic, recorded to S3 as PCap files.

• Formalized and automated construction of VPN instances
  • Started with 2 ad-hoc, server instances with minimal documentation / consistency and ad-hoc arrangement of Docker containers
  • Automated replacing dead VPN nodes, and scaling up on-demand – a previously error-prone, and time-intensive manual process
  • Worked around a critical and hard to resolve defect in StrongSwan by being able to replace nodes frequently
• Simplified Docker containers, normalized workflows around constructing and working with Docker containers, enabling rapid iteration of VPN design
• Migrated to CoreOS, simplifying orchestration of existing and new node types considerably
• Set up chat-ops (Lita.io), allowing easy-to-review operations log
• Created chat-ops workflows for managing large pool of Elastic IPs and Elastic Network Interfaces, VPN instances, and Route53 DNS entries for VPN nodes
• Designed outline for security architecture, giving business a path forward for ensuring protection of sensitive consumer VPN traffic as the organization grows

• Implemented major BI improvements, improving our A/B testing capabilities and enabling much more aggressive SEM efforts
• Prototyped second-generation repair price estimator
  • Improved ETL load times from 2 hours to 70 seconds (for 1.5GiB of source data) while extracting much more information
  • Simplified architectural model from earlier prototype, eliminating a significant amount of accidental workflow complexity
• Implemented major workflow improvements
  • Reduced onboarding from 2+ days involving interrupting multiple engineers to 1 day, mostly autonomous
  • Reduced test data load time from 8 hours to 15 minutes
  • Eliminated need to use sudo multiple times during per day
  • Halved execution time of integration test suite
  • Built a tool to help apply some of our style-guide rules to the approximately 100 kloc that did not adhere to them
• Prioritized roadmap of future improvements
  • Defined security model and practices to help protect PII provided by AARP
  • Enumerated changes needed for migration from EngineYard to AWS
  • Outlined processes for identifying and prioritizing code quality issues
  • Triaged several hundred potential security vulnerabilities, fixing dozens of actual issues
• Identified gaps in business continuity measures, and triaged high priority risks
• Responsible for most developer workflow, devops, and security concerns

Implemented first-generation system to gather, analyze, and report on large volumes of billing data (4TiB in first two years of operation, 8TiB within six months thereafter) representing over US$500m of our customers’ cloud spending.

Proved viability of concept, enabling company to raise US$1.25m in seed funding, and US$8.7m series A.

Responsible for highly security-conscious engineering culture, infrastructure and workflow, which an AWS Architect called “rock solid”.

Helped hire and build initial engineering team, while maintaining a security-conscious culture.

Responsible for guiding transition to AWS (EC2, RDS, S3) for second-generation e-commerce platform, and providing tactical support/expertise for Linux and MySQL.

• Built management tools to facilitate cloud-based development, testing, formal QA, staging, and production workflows using Rake and Fog
• Designed and implemented Chef-based systems management infrastructure for cloud-hosted servers
• Investigated zero-day security issue in major e-commerce platform, identified root cause, found solutions, provided repro case to vendor, and published to Full Disclosure list to allow other users to protect themselves
• Provided training to both development and operations staff on effective use of Amazon cloud infrastructure, reducing per-developer complexity overhead and mental energy wasted on cloud-specific issues

BidSystem Team

• Designed, implemented and launched a PHP-based, shared-nothing web service used to integrate various disparate business units in just 20 days when the C++-based core platform hit a massive scaling wall
  • New service handled 18x as many requests/sec on the same hardware
  • Losses were running at $15k/day until the new code was deployed
• Maintained and developed the service over much of its lifecycle, maintaining a strict SLA of 99% of requests to be serviced in 10ms or less, while keeping pace with high rate of change, and was commended by management on the service’s track record of consistency and reliability
• Trained a new recruit on the business objectives, critical practices/techniques employed, and details of the code itself allowing him to take ownership of the service while still maintaining an exceptional operational track record, with no ‘rough’ transitional period

Social Team

• Provided necessary expertise in moving from .Net to Mono on Linux, ensuring a timely and cost-effective migration
• Migrated an important, performance-sensitive ETL facility from .Net to Mono, reducing code volume by 90% while making it simpler, easier to learn, easier to debug/profile, easier to change, and easier to deploy
• Implemented near-real-time (10-15 minute latency) data warehouse to allow management to track the health of the system in bottom-line terms, and identify problems as quickly as possible
• Provided the insights necessary to resolve a critical system failure for a high volume system (500m+ requests/day), and to subsequently reduce the operational cost of that system by at least $112k (11%) per year, moving the system from being merely cost-competitive to being the most cost-effective option for the company

R&D Team

• Facilitated rapid iteration / reduced development friction by implementing tools to incrementally normalize build/deployment and common operational processes for multiple legacy codebases that were deployed to a variety of server configurations both directly to EC2 and indirectly via Scalr in order to facilitate experimental discovery of retargeting strategies needed to achieve goal of $10,000/day in revenue

Multiple Teams

• Evangelized and led-by-example in applying techniques and practices (TDD, DRY, and DevOps) aimed at improving programmer productivity while facilitating high rates of change
• Established a consistent track record of leaving codebases cleaner, and simpler than when I found them in order to facilitate cross-pollination and minimize the creation of hidden ‘silos’ of information trapped in the heads of individuals
• Evangelized git, trained and supported engineers in using git as individual teams migrated from SVN

• Designed and produced When Orcs Attack video game using Unity3D engine
  • Performed principal coding of the game in C#
  • Leading 5 contractors producing art and some code
• Developed Hordes of Orcs video game using Unity3D engine, working with publisher to meet a demanding schedule, while maintaining high standards for product excellence
• Designed and produced Harmonic Convergence video game using Torque Game Builder engine
  • Lead 14 contractors producing art and code
  • Performed principal coding of the game in C++ and TorqueScript
• Gave a “brown bag” session at Apple’s WWDC in 2007 at the request of GarageGames, the creators of Torque
• Produced Banzai Ball video game using Unity3D engine, coordinating the efforts of the lead programmer, 2 contract artists, and contract sound designer/musician
• Designed and implemented MrJoy.com online presence using Ruby on Rails, with game back-end features, analytics, e-commerce and content syndication capabilities

Games Shipped

	When Orcs Attack 3D tower defense game for Mac/PC with pathfinding, and an emphasis on simplicity.
	Epic Tower Defense Co-branded, web-based version of When Orcs Attack for Shockwave.com game portal, adapted to meet their requirements for transfer size and privacy.
	Hordes of Orcs Significantly enhanced version of When Orcs Attack aimed primarily at the Mac audience with a stronger emphasis on graphical quality.
	Harmonic Convergence A fast-paced rhythm/puzzle game whose music adapts to the intensity of how the player is playing.
	Hordes of Orcs 2 Sequel to Hordes of Orcs featuring new game elements, mechanics, visuals, content and an overhauled UI. Released primarily on Mac App Store.

As co-founder of Netblue, I developed and maintained a highly profitable promotional marketing platform through its full lifecycle: Design, implementation, maintenance/evolution, and retirement five years later.

Most significantly, I conceived, designed, implemented, and drove adoption of MySQL-based data warehouse to improve reporting performance and depth. Reports that took 6 hours to run subsequently took 20 seconds. New reports changed how we did business for several years and helped the company grow to a run-rate of $80m.

Once the company grew, I focused on the Business Intelligence side, participating in the design and implementation of a next-generation PostgreSQL based data warehouses.

• Maintained and assisted in development of Perl-based back-end architecture of flagship web-based e-mail system handling more than 12,000,000 mailboxes for 600,000 domains.
• Designed, implemented, and provided on-site customer support for “iL” product which provided larger partner sites a cross-site single-sign-on capability allowing the user to log in via the partner site, and be automatically logged into the Everyone.net mail system.
• Designed and implemented “rC” product which allowed web hosting services to white-label us and provide our products to their customers, via their own control-center systems.
• Designed and implemented “Everyone.net Addresses” product to provide a directory of partner sites for marketing purposes and to improve demographic targeting of partner sites for ad sales.
• Helped design and implement test cases for evaluation of EJB servers (including JBoss, BEA WebLogic, and Inprise Application Server) and database servers. (Oracle 8i, and DB2 UDB) Assisted in port of existing e-mail architecture from MySQL to DB2 UDB for performance evaluations.
• Designed middle-tier of prototype next generation hosted e-mail solution, including system to allow complex feature-flag configurations allowing maximum flexibility in making deals with resellers and partners, including graceful handling of special one-off deals.

• Developed many of the underlying technologies powering consumer and client-facing web application, including user-customization engine.
• Developed many novel and useful features to help set us apart from the competition, including resume “searchability” analysis tool.
• Planned design track for future versions of architecture and applications.
• Optimized design to ensure maximum performance from minimum resources.