Aaron Sherman's resume

From AJS.COM

Areas of Expertise

Roles

• Production Internet infrastructure management
• Manager of small teams of systems administrators/DBAs

• Security/capacity/contingency planning
• Web/database application performance analysis
• Advanced Perl programming (e.g core modifications, extensions)
• Revision control / release management

Key Technologies

Languages:

Perl (v3-5, library/module design, Perl 6 development), HTML, XML, C, C++, TCL, SQL, Shell scripting

Toolkits:

Tk, Perl5 XS, Xlib, GTk+, GNOME, The GIMP (plug-in API), GNU autoconf/automake

Systems Admin / Security:

Solaris, Linux (RedHat/SuSE/Slackware), SunOS, *BSD UNIX

Applications Administration:

CVS, Clearcase, Web servers (Netscape, Apache, NCSA), Storyserver (4.x) and Vignette V/5, Security/firewall tools including Linux iptables and ipchains, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL

Extensive use and modification of: MediaWiki, Gallery2

Publications

• Contributor: "Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk: Best of the Perl Journal", ISBN 0-596-00311-0
• Author: Perl Journal article, "Image Manipulation with Perl and The GIMP"
• Contributor: "Perl Resource Kit: UNIX Edition", ISBN 1-56592-370-7
• Contributor: "Perl Resource Kit: Win32 Edition", ISBN 1-56592-409-6
• Contributor: "Programming Perl: 2nd Edition" ("The Camel Book"), ISBN 1-56592-149-6
• Author: Daemon News articles:
  • The Very Long Night of FreeBSD (archived: The Very Long Night of FreeBSD) and
  • The Penguin's Council (archived: The Penguin's Council)
• Author and/or Contributor:
  • Modules included in the core Perl distribution
  • Plug-ins (e.g. glowing steel, among others) included in the core Gimp distribution.

Work History

VMware, Inc.

Member of Technical Staff May 2008 - Present

Member of the build team with responsibilities including development and maintenance of build tracking, reporting and related tools.

ITA Software, Inc.

Senior Systems Engineer / Toolsmith April 2001 - May 2008

One of a team of systems engineers. ITA was a small startup when I arrived and has grown into a thriving medium-sized company. My day-to-day duities include:

• Toolsmithing in Perl, C++ and shell scripts (including monitoring, control programs, QA support software, etc)
• Linux systems and network administration
• Rotating on-call duties
• Systems security
• Internal application support
• Customer and vendor support

HighWired.com

Systems Architect July 1999 - Feb 2001

A key role managing the production infrastructure team for a high-volume web site which included:

• Capacity planning
• Security and recovery planning.
• Database and content management performance analysis.
• Planning and deployment of systems infrastructure elements such as:
  • load-balancing hardware, static-content Web servers,
  • dynamic-content Web servers, firewalls, mass storage systems, etc.

Previous programming-oriented role in the company included:

• Wrote monitoring utilities.
• Implemented HTML-based spell-checking, 3D logo rendering, personalized mailing automation and partner content generation.
• Helped to estabish a development process.
• Mentored junior members of the development team.
• Extended/maintained Web applications.

Safety Net Solutions, Inc.

Senior Architect / Analyst April 1997 - May 1999

Contract programming assignments including:

Bank Boston (Now Bank of America)

UNIX Security Administrator November 1996 - March 1997

Security administration as well as maintenance of the 3rd party security software. Wrote reporting scripts in perl for auditors; Provided technical input on the establishment of UNIX security standards; specified and evaluated network security products; managed change control process.

I-Kinetics, Inc.

Consulting Services Group, Senior Consultant January 1992 - October 1996

Several contract positions and internal development. Individual descriptions follow (title reflects I-Kinetics title-level at that time, not the title held at the client site):

• 1996, Training And Course Development
• April 1996 - October 1996, Bank Boston security consulting
• August 1995 - April 1996, Open Market, software analyst / systems engineer
• 1992 - June 1995, Fidelity Investments:

• Lone systems administrator for the Fixed Income Trading Floor for 1.5 years
• Systems administration, hardware and software specification, etc.
• Software toolsmithing including a trade generation system written in TCL

Independent Work

Home Internet system

"Back in the day" it used to be interesting to cite the fact that I had a system that was on the Internet from home, complete with various servers and firewalling. These days, no one bats an eye, but there it is anyway. Though records have shuffled around a bit, I registered AJS.COM in 1994, and Internet Archive shows that I had Web services running in late 1996.

I also do a fair amount of programming on my own time. I am the author of a number of tools including plug-ins for The GIMP and library modules for Perl. If you want to see a sample of my work, download the latest development version (1.1.4 or later) of The GIMP source code and look under plug-ins/perl/examples/image_tile. Or, get it here. believe it or not, this is the kind of thing that I do for fun....

References

Provided upon request.

Samples of my Work Online

mkpasswd: http://www.ajs.com/ajswiki/Mkpasswd

Password generation is a hard problem that I've written a program to solve. It has followed me from job to job getting better along the way. You can have a look at mkpasswd's source code and documentation from my Web site.

mktreasure: http://www.ajs.com/d20/mktreasure

More recently, my gaming interests lead me to write the world's most complete d20 SRD 3.5 treasure generator. In case that means nothing to you, feel free to check check out its Wiki page (mktreasure) on AJS.COM which includes links to the source code.

Wowstreet: http://wowstreet.ajs.com/wowstreet?i=4306

I've created the Wowstreet item pricing database, which provides historical pricing analysis reports for items in the World of Warcraft game. For an example, see Silk Cloth. This was also one of my first experiments with the idea of HTML "badge" services.

Copyright

This resume is copyright 2005 by Aaron Sherman. Please see the licensing terms at AJS.COM:Copyright for details on distribution and duplication.