I’m currently a technical lead and engineering manager for the Tiger Team at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, writing code, and performing light management duties. For over two years I’ve worked on the “biggest bets” for the company: massively scalable ad serving systems, batch-oriented systems which process many terabytes daily, and multi-language web services globally deployed. All of these systems exist in multiple colos around the world. I’ve designed and written front-line servers, back-end application servers, monitoring systems, and REST services all of which are scalable and were deployed without incident. They work so well they are boring.
Members of the Tiger Team don’t own any of the technologies we write. We go in, understand a problem, design and implement a solution, train the maintenance team and then leave. It’s a great job if you like being on the cutting edge and learning a fundamentally new area of technology every 6 months. The Tiger Team concentrates some of the best engineers in the company, directed by executive level staff to the most important projects. I’ve been extremely lucky to work alongside some very talented people.
Prior to this I worked at a startup called WideOrbit as one of a small group of engineers that designed and built our flagship product. We built an n-tier, distributed ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system for broadcast television which had a simple drag-and-drop UI, automatic spot placement, and allowed separate stations to be managed as a group. In 1999, we didn’t have any television stations using our system. By 2004, our WOStation product was the leading software product in North America having displaced a market leader with over 80% of the total market share. Today WideOrbit is the leading provider of software for the media industry, largely built on the success of the product our team created. Another successful business built on the “better mousetrap” principle.
Prior to this I worked at a company called Sense8 making 3D simulation and virtual world building software.
I attended UC Berkeley and was awarded my Master’s Degree in Computer Science, specializing in computer graphics. I solved some extremly hard 2.5D folding, real-time, geometric CAD synthesis problems for my thesis. I attended UCLA as an undergrad and was awarded my B.S. degree in Math and Computer Science.
Before this I was the programmer behind the Electronic Arts Title “Brad Hazard and the Caverns of Doom,” an arcade game for the Atari computer, requiring infiltration of a futuristic fortress guarded by lasers, electric barriers, and intelligent robots bent on your destruction. The protagonist was a secret agent, outfitted with the latest reactive armor jump suit, bristling with weaponry. My title was canceled when a similar product was released by Activision called “Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.”
My earliest computer experience was at age 16. I remember being mesmerized by the Intellivision Baseball game in the Best department store in Upland, California. I stared for 30 minutes watching the tiny animated figures round the bases, working their slow magic on me. I left a changed person, resolving to figure out “how to make the little men run.” I somehow persuaded my parents to buy me a computer if I got “straight A’s” on my report card. In retrospect I was clearly set up by people much smarter than I was. I recall the pained expression on Mom’s face as she wrote the check for an Atari 800 with 16K of RAM. This would immediately need to be upgraded to 48K requiring much pleading, and inducing more pained expressions. Computers somehow cost about $1,500 back then, just as they do now, an economic miracle that reeks of industry collusion.
I recall closing my bedroom door one Summer night, and then emerging several months later, with my first commercial software product “Animator,” a player-missile animation system with a frame editor, playback system, demos, and tutorial. I made tiny running people, knights on ostriches, flying dragons, and space ships using Atari’s “advanced” graphical sprites. My most memorable animated tutorial took a full 2 minutes to have my tiny creations assemble my name, letter by letter – an egotistical spectacle whose memory still makes me grin.
I’ve recently learned that the creator of the highly successful Activision arcade game “Pitfall,” David Crane, was mesmerized by his own “little running man,” which was the game’s raison d’être.
I guess I wasn’t the only one bit by the magic. Some days, I’m still trying to capture the magic of that tiny running man.
