Tag: MySQL

Categories
eCommerce Performance Engineering Site Reliability

Always Be Improving

(Decorist : 8/18-12/19)

Challenge

Leading-by-example to own and improve systems as sole ENGR having SRE/DevOps/Frontend/Backend experience.

Action

Mar 2019

Watching our AWS costs rise ~8% monthly…

Costs Rising

I learned about and subscribed to Reserved Instances to realize costs savings for our hosting spend:

Dec 2019

Though not leading to cost savings or revenue generation, part of my responsbilities have been database administration, jumping in when the production DB would spike like below, figuring out if a runaway process needed to be terminated, if a slow query was bringing it to its knees, if a cron job was introducing load, or whatever needed to be done to keep the site up.

Or when bots would crawl the site, bringing it down, necessitating an IP block:

Or when digging into the logs to find that a route was 500ing and had to be fixed:

Mar 2020

Using Cloudcraft, I diagrammed our AWS infrastructure, identifying and deleting 1000 unused SQS instances.

Also identified and deleted numerous unused RDS snapshots:

All changes led to a yet another 37% reduction in MoM AWS costs:

Results

  • Saved company 115% of my salary in 2019 through process improvements.
Categories
Affiliate Backend eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Growth supply-side

Selling More

(Shop It To Me : 6/10-7/12)

Results

  • Iterating with Product to scope, implement (Rails w/MySQL,) and A/B-test pixel-perfect sign-up/refer-a-friend/search/browse/opt-out/profile experiences
  • Drove conversions in the form of signups, virality, and clicks for not only our flagship web and email products (used by 4M+ users) but also eight new product launches
  • Architected company’s newest Ember.js-based product
  • Quickly integrated into a small, fast-moving, startup engineering team
  • Became proficient in all things Rails
  • Ensuring quality through the use of code reviews, TDD, unit, functional, integration, and regression tests under continuous integration, testing plans, and mentoring/pairing to deliver functionality, fix bugs, refactor legacy code, and transfer knowledge
  • Have assumed lead (primarily frontend) responsibilities while reporting directly to CTO
  • Established F2E guidelines and best practices
  • Architected the company’s newest product, an Ember.js-based Single Page Application
  • Leveraged Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest APIs to increase our social reach (including the use of Facebook Connect and the Like Button during signup and tell-a-friend experiences)
  • Prototyped iPhone app for user to navigate item stream during in-house Hackathon
  • Contributed improvements to our Nokogiri-based data-harvesting framework.
Categories
eCommerce Frontend supply-side

Faceted Navigation

(Shop It To Me : 3/11-5/11)

Built in Prototype JS, the Shop It To Me Search experience provides users with a specificity to formulate search parameters.

You’ll see in the following screenshot (click to view) filters for price, discount, clothing type, brand, and retailer.

The product had been built well before I joined the company, but I took over maintenance and support for it.

Results

  • maintained company’s faceted search SPA
Categories
demand-side Frontend Innovation Prototyping

Hackathon : Tweet Dashboard

(Shop It To Me : 3/11-5/11)

Built in Prototype JS, the Shop It To Me Search experience provides users with a specificity to formulate search parameters.

You’ll see in the following screenshot (click to view) filters for price, discount, clothing type, brand, and retailer.

The product had been built well before I joined the company, but I took over maintenance and support for it.

Results

  • maintained company’s faceted search SPA
Categories
Frontend Full-Stack SPAs

Experience Monitoring at Scale

(Yahoo! : 5/07-2/09)

Yahoo invests a lot of resources into making sure that each of its properties is available around the clock. To assist in that task, a centralized, black-box service was created as part of dev tools to help everyone from senior management to service engineers monitor and understand the health of properties.

On the backend, the service consists of the data store, a metrics collector, aggregation tools, and the configuration store (database-driven.) On the front end, there’s dashboarding, custom reports, and a self-service configuration tool.

Results

  • built and maintained web tools for a Nagios-based experience management solution checking 10,000+ URLs worldwide daily generating 63M measurements per month
  • reduced workload of system engineers by creating (from scratch) a web-based, MySQL-driven, MVC-architected, self-service configuration tool for creation of and management of Nagios checks
  • led SCRUM-influenced development and improved the quality of the team’s SE process by standardizing on championing the use of Catalyst (an MVC framework in Perl.) Improvements included shortened dev cycles, the introduction of TDD, improved performance, better documentation
  • created snappy, responsive interfaces using custom JavaScript along with YUI in conjunction with JSON-serving REST web services (Perl.) Also achieved performance gains through page-weight optimization
  • reduced development costs through the use of VMWare virtual machines for testing, building, and deploying as part of continuous integration. Implemented a packaged solution for automated regression testing using Firefox, Selenium, X, WWW::Mechanize
Categories
Backend demand-side Frontend Full-Stack SOA Troubleshooting

(Executive) Enterprise Dashboarding

(Yahoo! : 5/07-7/07)

An external consultant to the team had been brought in to develop an überdashboard to aggregate data from another project. The learning curve was steep and the consultant wasn’t familiar with the base data so his dashboard had some major shortcomings.

Results

  • Jumped in two weeks before release date, took ownership, and still delivered a web-based, executives’ dashboard solution for experience monitoring without the benefits of system documentation or tests
  • Reduced 74% page load-time through refactoring backend, improving database queries, introducing pagination for an 80 KLOC (LAMPerl) data warehousing web app
  • Discovered and remedied major data quality issues before going live
  • Radically improved the look and usability of the tool
Categories
demand-side supply-side

Leading Students

(ASIST : 09/02-04/03)

President, Webmaster, Liason: all different hats I wore while reviving the chapter. In the previous year, almost had nothing been done and the chapter was almost defunct.

Results

  • Led chapter as President to 400% growth in membership
Categories
Machine Learning supply-side

Recommendation System for Courses

(UNC Classfinder : 01/02-01/03)

Led team of two devs who, as a class project, developed beta of the system over the course of four months.

Results

  • Led the creation of a Recommendation System.
Categories
Uncategorized

Digitally Managing the Cultural Heritage of the South

(UNC Chapel Hill : 05/01-09/01)

Documenting the American South is a digital library hosted at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and during my graduate degree there, I worked for them to create a custom CMS.

Results

  • Created a CMS reducing costs by 11% per year, managing a 100+ page website, cutting time-to publication by 89% for managing the most comprehensive digital library on culture of the American south.