Blair J. Zajac, Ph.D.

blair@orcaware.com 2810 Vista Way
www.orcaware.com/blair/ Hemet, CA 92544
Phone: 951-925-4752
QUALIFICATIONS
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Overview - In the last 13 years worked in software development (Akamai Technologies), web/middle-tier development (Sony Imageworks) and Internet operations (Yahoo!) with a number of technologies and languages, most recently leading a software middle-tier development team.
Management - At Sony Imageworks lead a five person the middle-tier team responsible for the facility's largest middle-tier projects (asset management systems, render queueing and backup systems). At Applied Minds, manage an IT department. At Akamai, managed the engineering source code partnerships with IBM, Novell, Alteon, CacheFlow, F5, Radware and Resonate. At DemoGraFX, managed organizational changes to add production quality programming practices to an R&D group.
Architect: Software and Infrastructure - Design and architect a three-tier asset management system for Sony Pictures Imageworks that serves 28,000 requests per second with subsecond response times. Architect for web operations, availability and performance for the 3rd largest website in the world in 1999, GeoCities.
Languages - C (19 years), C++ (19 years), Scala (5 years), Python (9 years), Java ( 7 years), JavaScript (2 years), Ruby (2 years) and Perl (22 years ).
Databases - Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, memcached, Cassandra.
Open Source Contributions - Subversion source control system, the MacPorts and Fink distribution systems for Mac OS X, Scala Migrations, Ruby on Rails, Amanda Backup Solution.
Source Control - git, Gerrit (with Jenkins), Subversion, Mercurial.
Operations - 24x7x365 with three shifts of operators at Yahoo!/GeoCities, the 3rd largest website in the world at the time.
EXPERIENCE
Manager, Software Development
Sony Imageworks, Culver City, CA
May 2005 - Current
  Manager of software development and operations for web and middle-tier business applications that are used in five distributed facilities to produce visual effects. The applications are responsible for the running of the facility, as they manage all the assets, queue render jobs and backup 1/2 Pbytes. The software written is in Scala, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, C++ and C and uses PostgreSQL and Oracle backends.

Greenfield rearchitecture of all core middle-tier applications, e.g. render queue, asset management, filesystem management, to support Imageworks operating in three continents. Our largest application supports 28,000 requests per second with subsecond response times.

Introduce Scala to the organization. We were the first enterprise company to adopt Scala.

Participate on open-sourcing Imageworks' projects ensure Imageworks' tools are adopted in the industry and not other open-source projects. Open source Scala Migrations.

Introduce structured code development policies (code reviews, continuous integration), using git, Gerrit and Jenkins.
Director, IT
Applied Minds, Glendale, CA
March 2003 - February 2005
  Director of IT for a mixed Linux, Mac OS X and Windows environment.
Consulting Programmer
Los Angeles, CA
October 2002 - March 2003
  Wrote a program in Objective Caml (an object oriented functional language) to load a 70 Mbyte XML file containing an English dictionary into MySQL. Program finds the subtrees that contain word definitions, runs each definition through an XSLT processor to generate static HTML, and finally store the HTML in a MySQL database for fast queries for YourHomework.
Manager, IT
DemoGraFX (Purchased by Dolby), Marina del Rey, CA
November 2001 - September 2002
  Instituted organizational changes to move the software development team from an R&D style group to a group that produces production quality code. Migrated the source code repository from CVS to Subversion. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Consulting Programmer
Los Angeles, CA
April 2001 - November 2001
  Committer on the Subversion source code management system, which is designed to be a CVS replacement. Designed, implemented and installed web log processing and analysis system for Yourhomework.com.
Senior System Software Engineer
Akamai Technologies, San Mateo, CA
October 1999 to April 2001
  Brought in to manage and design a multithreaded C Microsoft IIS plugin that dynamically modifies HTML content that system administrators of Akamai's customers would install into their web servers to more easily use Akamai's content delivery services. The Akamaizer is 60,000 lines of multithreaded C code. Designed and wrote a test suite in Perl consisting of 11,000 tests to validate the product.

Managed the technical partnerships between Akamai's Akamaizer engineering team and the partner engineering teams at IBM, Novell, Alteon, CacheFlow, F5, Radware and Resonate to integrate the Akamaizer source code into the partner's hardware or software product and validate that the partner's product met Akamai's product standards. Designed and negotiated source code licensing agreements with IBM, Novell, Radware and Resonate.
Project Manager and Architect
Yahoo!/GeoCities, Santa Clara, CA
July 1998 to October 1999
  Project manager for web site's architecture, availability and performance improvements. Over 6 months managed the system administration team that raised Yahoo!/GeoCities' ranking in Internet World Keynote download times from number 16 at 9.60 seconds to number 3 at 4.48 seconds for web site performance. Work with Exodus in reducing monthly bandwidth bill by $40,000/month due to incorrect billing calculations performed by Exodus.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Managed project to migrate storage from Veritas to Network Appliance NAS storage, saving $250,000 while increasing site availability and improving file access times by 50%.

Research new technologies to incorporate into the web site, including 5 Tbytes of Network Appliance storage. Specify new approaches, new technologies to implement and technical details to the system administration team.

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ARTICLES & PAPERS
EDUCATION
  • Ph.D. Geophysics, 1998, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California
  • M.S. Geophysics, 1993, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California
  • Bachelor of Science Physics cum laude with honors, 1990, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington