Blair J. Zajac, Ph.D.

 
13900 Tahiti Way #308 blair@orcaware.com Phone: 310-574-6018

 

Marina del Rey, CA 90292 www.orcaware.com/blair/ Fax: 310-574-9201

 


OBJECTIVE
To be a CTO of an Internet company.
QUALIFICATIONS
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 a visual effects company; designed and wrote a 50,000 line C++ data analysis package. Architect for web operations, availability and performance for the 3rd largest website in the world in 1999, GeoCities.
Software Development - C (15 years), C++ (11 years) C++, Scala (1 year), Python (4 years), Java (2 years), Ruby (2 years) and Perl (15 years). A committer on the Subversion version control system and to the MacPorts and Fink distribution systems for Mac OS X. Development on Linux, Solaris and Windows. Version control systems: Subversion, Perforce and CVS/RCS. Author of Orca, an open source tool downloaded 10,000 times and used to monitor and plot operating system and web server performance. Author of 5 object-oriented Perl CPAN modules.
Operations - 24x7x365 with three shifts of operators at Yahoo!/GeoCities with 200 Solaris SPARC servers running Apache with an Informix backend with 10 terabytes of local Veritas and Network Appliance storage that served over 1.2 Gbit/sec of web traffic. Applied Minds and DemoGraFX's internal infrastructure with Microsoft Windows Active Directory, Exchange, Veritas and Amanda backups.
EXPERIENCE
Manager, Software Development
Sony Imageworks, Culver City, CA
May 2005 - Current
  Manager of a software development team that writes and manages three-tier applications. The applications are responsible for the running of the facility, as they manage all the assets, queue render jobs and backup the 150 Tbytes.

The software written is in Python, Scala, Perl, Ruby and Ruby on Rails C and uses PostgreSQL and Oracle backends.
Director, IT
Applied Minds, Glendale, CA
March 2003 - Feburary 2005
  Director of IT for a mixed Linux, Mac OS X and Windows environment.

Managed external and internal websites running RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 and Debian Sarge with Apache 1.3.33 and 2.0.53 with PHP, MySQL 4.1, phpmyadmin, mod_perl, mod_dav, and Subversion.

Develop a tool suite written in Perl, C and Python to import bitmap images and vector graphics files into an image management system when a user drags a file onto a Samba file server. Wrote a C multithread safe shared library that is loaded via LD_PRELOAD to intercept and log all the filesystem libc calls that Samba makes to monitor when a file has been uploaded. Log files written by the LD_PRELOAD library are processed by a Python script which runs a Perl script to generate thumbnails and to import the image's metadata using DBI and DBD::DB2 into an IBM DB2 database.
Consulting Programmer
Los Angeles, CA
October 2002 - March 2003
  Wrote a program in Objective Caml (an object oriented functional language) to load an 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. Moved the company's public website from serving static HTML pages to using mod_perl in Apache and the Template::Toolkit engine.

Consulting Programmer
Los Angeles, CA
April 2001 - November 2001
  Developer 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 from 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.

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.

Designed and wrote Orca, an open-source tool that gathers statistics operating system and web server resource utilization statistics from 200 web servers to help plan and budget for the growth of a server farm.
Geophysics Researcher and Programmer
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
August 1995 to February 1998
  Designed new mathematical tools and computational techniques utilizing genetic algorithms and Powell optimizers to invert oil well breakout data for regional tectonic stress states. Implemented the technique in a 50,000 line C++ package.
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