Senior information technology manager with over 10 years of professional Internet business experience with a proven track record at running a cool, calm operation in a high pressure 24-hour environment.

Employment history

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Google, Inc. Google.com Engineering Project Manager

Mountain View, CA Feb 2007 — Present

• Managed a team of 10 Systems Engineers, Architects, and Database Administrators with 100% responsibility for a remotely located 700 sq. ft. caged data center (approximately 350 servers) which services nearly 9 million monthly unique site visitors and over 130 million monthly page views.
• Planned and executed major production system migrations and upgrades with near-zero downtime, including Network Appliance filers, Cisco networking equipment, PIX firewalls, BigIP, WAN/LAN T1 and Metro E circuits, Web systems running BEA Weblogic 5.0 to 7.1 to 9.1, Oracle 8 to 9i to 10g, Solaris 8 to SUSE Linux migrations, and several other support systems
• Implemented an advanced Content Delivery Network (Akamai) to improve and harden site uptime and reliability as well as to prepare our media sites to handle unexpected news-related traffic spikes. This allowed us to serve 5x more traffic as our previous limit with no additional hardware or software in our data center and also offered full protection from denial of service (DDoS) attacks
• Implemented from the ground-up a new Help Desk with 1^st and 2^nd tier support technicians available 24 hours a day by email and direct telephone communication. This reduced interruptions on core development teams which helped to better meet deadlines.
• Migrated 20+ newspaper websites from a legacy proprietary content management system to Interwoven TeamSite CMS.
• Developed and instituted a Newspaper Association of America (NAA) Award winning hot deployment code release system to allow for unobtrusive anytime code deployments. This allowed for 1) zero-downtime weekly code updates, 2) a near total reduction in scheduled overnight maintenance windows for daytime personnel and 3) the ability to address urgently and severely problematic issues live on our sites, any time of day.
• Created a fully-automated code deployment process for development teams. This 1) more clearly defined and organized change management procedures and schedules, 2) instituted more strict code tagging for better revision control management, 3) improved code deployment procedural documentation and knowledge sharing, 4) provided developers a means to test and integrate their code on nights/weekends without the need for manual engineering intervention, and 5) freed up engineering resources by up to 15 man-hours per week
• Brought in as a consultant to oversee a major system upgrade for the number one revenue generating website vertical for Cox Newspapers (online job listings), my team reduced the previously planned 48+ hours of total downtime for the upgrade to just 4 hours of reduced functionality while keeping the sites online for the duration.
• Implemented more granular and standardized system monitoring and metric-gathering tools to provide for long-term trend analysis to better handle system usage and proactive growth planning.
• Scrutinized hardware and support contract agreements to reduce support spending by 1/3. This amount of savings has been found again every year.
• Instituted internal IT docs website with formalized documentation standards and procedures across all of IT to improve overall departmental organization.
• Ensured continued employee personal developmental growth by budgeting for and engaging the team in annual training courses and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
• Expanded the company into new office space, including project scope and planning tasks related to not just technology-specific items (desktop connectivity and seamless integration into existing LAN), but also facilities (HVAC, power, UPS, phones)
• To attack the challenges the company faced amidst a larger departmental reorganization, I operated as the sole on-call person for over 6 months handling ALL overnight and weekend issues (previously managed by four rotating full time employees). This equated to 6-10 weekly overnight calls requiring a 15-minute active (ie. at a workstation) response time, and was done w/o assignment by my superiors.
• Implemented shared Local Programming Environment web hosting infrastructure to give our newspaper brands more control of their websites and to encourage innovation. This also lowered costs by centralizing an in-house and extensible hosting solution, versus requiring each newspaper to host with external vendors.

• Remotely managed 5 technical analysts and programmers located around the country who were responsible for software development and technical support for locally-focused city sites in 40+ high speed internet markets (Cox Communications).
• Performed formal project management techniques including change control, risk management, and status reporting
• Operated 24x7 website support for nearly 30 local offices around the country
• Designed, built, and maintained website tools to be used by over 800,000 unique daily visitors with over 6.5 million daily page views
• Composed Statement of Work reports to evaluate and recognize problematic areas with products or partnerships with potential vendors
• Created, coached, and reviewed development/performance plans for subordinates

• Built custom CGIs and online tools for local city site, DiscoverOmaha.com
• Purchased and setup live web cam software and hardware for promotional events like the Buy.com Golf Classic, Live In It To Win It, College World Series, and TV partner Doppler radar and city cams.
• Provided all technical PC support and LAN setup for local studio
• Trained content producers in HTML, image manipulation, Internet tools, and basic web knowledge

• Rapid Application Development to produce website storyboards and interfaces
• Programmed both CGIs and NSAPI modules to create completely dynamic sites
• Participated heavily in early design strategies with customers
• Developed secure internet commerce software
• Handled customer incident reports and debuged software

• Maintained media-side of Unix based web server
• Designed, programmed, and maintained client websites
• Coordinated bottom up site strategies with clients
• Programmed CGIs for secure credit card transactions and online ordering
• Trained clients to update and edit sites themselves

Awards

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Newspaper Association of America 2004 Best Practices Award in New Media for a software upgrade and hot deployment system for high traffic websites.

Technology Skills

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PERL, PHP, HTML/CSS/XML/XSL/Javascript/AJAX, General Solaris/Linux/HP-UX Systems Administration, BEA Weblogic Platform with Portal and Integration, Jboss/Tomcat, Oracle 9i & 10g RAC/MySQL/Caché, Computer Network and Web Application Security, Network Appliance NAS, Interwoven TeamSite, Apache, CVS/RCS, SSL, Netbackup, DNS

Education

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