Ben Friedland
Phone: [Please use email for initial contact]
www.bugben.com
bfriedland174@yahoo.com
Linked-In Profile
View some of my code samples or visit my GitHub.

Profile Summary:

Senior software/systems engineer with twelve years of professional experience.
Unique mix of software engineering and systems administration.
Possess a wide range of technical knowledge in many areas, specializing in software architecture and development.
Extremely knowledgeable of the Linux operating system, along with various applications and tools commonly used in a Linux environment.
Twelve years of experience in the analysis, design and development of both commercial and custom software.
Red Hat Certified Engineer and Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator (Certification ID: 120-054-903)
Proficient in object design patterns, problem solving and identifying/avoiding anti-patterns.
Very strong analytical, oral, and written communication skills.
Contributor and supporter of various open source software projects.

Technical Expertise:

Web Application Development:

Python, Django, South, Front End Development (HTML5, jQuery, AJAX, Bootstrap), Internal Tools

Operating Systems:

Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS), Sun Solaris, other Unix variants, OSX, Microsoft Windows

Microsoft .NET:

C#, Visual Basic .NET, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, WCF

Other Languages:

Python, ColdFusion, PHP, Perl

Databases:

MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server 2000-2008, Oracle: 8i - 9i - 10g, PostgreSQL

Development Environments:

VIM, Visual Studio .NET, Eclipse, NetBeans, Notepad

Other Skills:

XML, JSON, XSL, AJAX, JavaScript, HTML, HTML 5, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Scriptaculous, ASP, VBScript, Bash (shell scripting), VIM, SQL, PL/SQL, T-SQL, ORM (Hibernate/NHibernate), GIT, Heroku, Amazon EC2, Apache, GIS, Reporting, Video/Audio Processing and Production

Experience:

University of Southern California (USC)
Los Angeles, California
February, 2013 - Current
Software Developer - Consultant

Consultant for various jobs. Created a data warehouse application in Django with advanced reshaping of data.

TiVo
Santa Clara, California
June, 2011 - Current
Senior Unix Engineer / Tools Developer

Heavy use of Django to create several internal tools, including an advanced scheduling tool used daily by the NOC team. This tool is capable of finding holes in the schedule, allowing users to request time off and allows managers to manage the schedule using a very slick UI.
In a very short time, learned the vast workings of one of the most complex Linux environments in existence. TiVo pioneered using Linux as an appliance, and the workplace offered the opportunity to work with some of the greatest minds in the field.
Mixed heavy development talents with day-to-day operations within the NOC and was able to automate many tasks, saving several man-hours per day.

MedicAlert Foundation
Turlock, California
November, 2008 - June, 2011
Senior Software Engineer

Honored employee - awarded recognition In April 2009. The only person in a 200+ employee company to be honored the entire year of 2009.
Assisted with migration from Sun Web Server to Apache. Wrote scripts to automatically migrate a huge list of redirects from Sun's XML redirect configuration to Apache's text based configuration.
Heavy use of JQuery and Ajax to create a personal health record editor for users of MedicAlert service. This replaced an old broken system and the company was extremely pleased to go from several dozens of customer complaints per day to virtually zero.
Developed a class library in .NET which acted as a transport for web service calls between a legacy VB6 app and newer web services.

American Medical Response
Modesto, California
November, 2006 - November, 2008
Senior Software Engineer

Developed an automatic update client run on the field by hundreds of ambulance which would query a web service to determine if a newer version of software was available. If a new package was available it would queue up the download using Microsoft's Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) API , which would trickle download the file based on limited internet availability on the field. When the download was complete, the tool would decrypt the archive and extract, then automatically restart the necessary modules. Every bit of this was done without any UI interaction - completely invisible to the user.
Created a very sophisticated console based daemon app which would monitor Tracy Fire Department's live data stream and send information to AMR's Ambulance dispatcher units through a six-step process of downloading, extracting, converting, processing, uploading, and logging. This data was emergency-service-critical and the daemon needed to be rock solid. It never once went down.

MedicAlert Foundation
Turlock, California
January, 2006 - July, 2006
.NET Engineer (Consultant)

Introduced and implemented object/relational persistence tools. Created entire class library, then used NHibernate to logically map all objects to existing database structure. Then created very simple CRUDs to allow edits through a .NET Web Service.

Stanislaus County Superior Court
Modesto, California
July, 2004 - December, 2005
.NET Engineer (Consultant)

Migrated database from Oracle to SQL Server.
Developed entire cashiering system from the ground up using C# and SQL Server. This included an expansion of their database schema and migration of portions of an old, undocumented Cobol application.
Created a ASP.NET web-based court calendar application to assist with the scheduling of court cases. This calendar has become a key component in their day-to-day operations and was featured in an article in the Modesto Bee.

LowerMyBills.com
Santa Monica, California
November, 2003 - June, 2004
.NET Engineer

Developed a front-end Windows Forms user interface for data entry of lenders. Also created an auto-updating component that would query an internal web server on each launch, looking for updates. If updates were available, it would update the application and restart the application, all transparent to the user.
Performed load testing for migrating an existing application from JRUN to Tomcat with clustering and load balancing.
Wrote an extensive logging framework for tracking and debugging issues within the enterprise applications.

California CAD Solutions
Modesto, California
December, 2001 - October, 2003 / June, 1999 - January, 2000
Senior Programmer / Architect

Used advanced geometry to create a geocoding algorithm which was capable of guessing the geographic location of a street address.
Created a real-time hierarchical database tracer for tracing pipe networks upstream or downstream.
Developed a modular Web application framework backend in ColdFusion with a skinnable front-end.
Designed, architected, and programmed many GIS solutions on a variety of platforms including ColdFusion, ASP.NET (C#), and J2EE (Tomcat).
Interfaced with many different database platforms including DB2, Oracle 8/9i, SQL Server, Microsoft Access, DBF, SHP, SDF, MySQL, and many more.
Performed advanced file I/O on the SHP binary file format. This included parsing header information and creating a separate index file containing file offset addresses of key data.
Created T-SQL and PL/SQL stored procedures for nightly batch processing of geographical data.

Therapeutic Research, Inc.
Stockton, California
October, 2000 - July, 2001
Contract Position: Application Developer / Database Architect

Developed a secure authentication system for subscribers to an e-zine. (ASP 3.0)
Migrated a database of over 100,000 subscribers to a normalized database in SQL Server 2000.

Admail West
Sacramento, California
June, 2000 - October, 2000
Team Leader, Intranet Application Development

Managed a team of four developers in the creation of an intranet application for data entry. This included a rich front-end - heavy in JavaScript/DHTML, and a powerful back-end in ColdFusion.
Developed a database logging system which would track the speed and accuracy of individual data entry clerks.

KeraVision, Inc.
San Rafael, California
June, 2000
Contract Position: ColdFusion Developer

Performed maintenance on a high-traffic web site to decrease load times.
Optimized back-end ColdFusion code to decrease server impact during peak traffic.

marchFIRST, Inc.
San Francisco, California
January, 2000 - June, 2000
ColdFusion Developer

Created dynamic front-end pages for large sites such as Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, and Toys 'R' Us.
Lead a team of six engineers for the entire front-end development of Williams-Sonoma Online Wedding Registry.

Big Valley Internet
Ceres, California
April, 1998 - June, 1999
Webmaster

Used ColdFusion to create dynamic Web applications for several clients.
Created an online telephone prefix lookup to find local numbers for a large ISP.

Work samples, articles, performance reports, skill details, etc. are all available upon request. Use the contact information above. Some projects/samples available at http://www.bugben.com/samples.

Ben Friedland Phone: [Please use email for initial contact] www.bugben.com bfriedland174@yahoo.com Linked-In Profile View some of my code samples or visit my GitHub.