Jay Buffington

Contact

1643 Sixth Ave.
San Diego, CA 92101
jay@mlug.missouri.edu
(619) 793-9973

Summary

I have been professionally involved in software development since 1999. I am self motivated and have a strong sense of curiosity. My area of expertise is building scalable web applications using open source tools such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl.

Skills

Languages and related
technologies 		Perl, Java, mod_perl, Javascript and AJAX, MySQL, Oracle, (X)HTML and CSS, RSS, Mason, DBIx::Class, Template Toolkit web services and REST, Catalyst, XML, PHP, C
Servers and tools Apache (1 & 2), Perforce, Subversion, Regular Expressions, Perlbal, mod_ssl, memcached, Squid (I've got my eye on Varnish), Postfix, NFS, SSH
Operating systems Many Flavors of Linux (especially Debian and RedHat), FreeBSD, Solaris
Other skills
  • Object oriented analysis, design, and programming
  • Benchmarking, Load Testing, Optimization
  • Architecting and managing large Perl web applications
  • Managing Code Deployment
  • Internationalization and localization, including Unicode and character set conversions
  • Testing (unit, system, regression)
  • Email parsing and generation
  • Network applications and daemons

Experience

Sony Electronics

2005-Present

At Sony I was a Senior Applications Developer for ImageStation.com, an online photo sharing website. I wore three hats: front end developer, back end developer and systems architect. As a front end developer I worked with Javascript and HTML::Mason. The back end system I worked with was comprised of Perl running in Apache on Linux connecting to an Oracle database. As a systems architect I focused on page load times and scalability.

When I began with the team we worked on a legacy code base which was causing maintenance problems and slowing new development. Rather than pushing for a rewrite I lead by example to refactor the code. I followed Perl best practices, wrote thousands of tests, and documented modules. This effort resulted in fewer bugs, faster turn around time for new projects and an increase in developer morale.

One of the more challenging tasks I worked on was rearchitecting the storage system of ImageStation's 250 terabytes of images. I moved away from costly NAS equipment to a distributed file system that scaled horizontally. This reduced cost per terabyte by a factor of five and storage management by 30 hours a week without sacrificing access time.

Club Photo

2003-2005

During the time I worked at Club Photo we focused on producing photo prints and gifts for affiliates. I worked as a lead engineer developing lab software. The lab system was written in Perl, ran on Linux servers and talked to a MySQL database.

Much of my time was spent working with affiliates whose products we produced. In a joint project with our largest affiliate we developed a shipping consolidation system that saved 25% on shipping costs while still meeting shipping deadlines.

University Of Missouri

1999-2003

Throughout my time at the University of Missouri I held several different part-time positions, all of which directly related to my field of study. As a freshman I wrote installation guides geared towards educators to aid in their use of open source software. My sophomore and junior years were spent as a system administrator where I helped administer the hundreds of Unix (mostly Linux) servers. In my senior year I taught two lab sessions for an introductory Java class.

As a system administrator I worked on implementing a single sign on system for 40,000+ students, faculity and staff. Much of this was done using Perl and Kerberos.

Education

University Of Missouri

Graduated from the University of Missouri - Columbia in May 2003.
Received Bachelor of Science in Computer Science