I have a very broad skill set. I enjoy wearing multiple hats and have also handled operations for what I have developed at most places I have worked including Sparkart, Amazon, FrugalMechanic and TecAlliance.
The following in a non-comprehensive list of technologies I have worked with.
Programming Languages
I’ve worked with over a dozen programming languages in production during my career and have always enjoyed learning new languages as-needed.
I have the most recent and comprehensive experience in Scala and Java since those were the main languages used at FrugalMechanic and TecAlliance.
SecondSpace was a Microsoft shop so they were all about C# and Transact-SQL. Although I snuck in some Java for indexing data into Apache Solr while I was overhauling the entire search and browse backend.
At Amazon I used a wide variety of languages including: C++, Java, Perl, PHP and Ruby.
I think Bash has been used everywhere I have worked. There is always some sort of command line scripting that needs to happen.
Relational Databases
I’ve used MySQL the most in my career including at Sparkart, Amazon, FrugalMechanic and TecAlliance. I’ve operated MySQL in Active-Active (Multi-Master) setups as well as with read-only replica setups.
SecondSpace made extensive use of SQL Server which had me digging through thousands of lines of Transact-SQL code.
NoSQL
I’ve worked with many NoSQL data stores over the years.
There was a time at Frugal Mechanic when I implemented out backend processing on several different NoSQL solutions to see which one would work the best, including, Berkeley DB Java Edition, Cassandra and CouchDB. I also used Redis to build an Anti-Bot and Anti-Scraping solution to combat a blog spam problem we were having.
Berkeley DB Java Edition (based on LSM Trees) worked well for me at Frugal Mechanic for doing backend batch processing of data. However, at some point Oracle changed the licensing for it to be less commercial friendly so I stopped using it. I found LMDB (based on B+ Trees) to be a good replacement and wrote a Java wrapper around the C library called lmdb-je. It was used heavily at TecAlliance and was useful for off-heap storage.
I used MongoDB for a while at TecAlliance before dropping it for a combination of MySQL and DynamoDB.
Apache Solr
Apache Solr deserves its own section! I’ve been using Apache Solr since version 1.2 in 2007 when it originally graduated from the Apache Incubator.
I originally came across it at SecondSpace while looking for a solution to performance problems we were having with the SQL-based backend. I used Apache Solr to completely rewrite the search and browse backend increasing performance by 100x! Using the right tool for the job makes a huge difference.
Apache Solr was also a key piece of the backend at both Frugal Mechanic and TecAlliance.
I have also used Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Apache Lucene directly (which is what Solr, ElasticSearch and OpenSearch are all based on).
Amazon Web Services
I’ve been working with Amazon Web Service since they originally launched in 2006 back while I was working at Amazon. While Frugal Mechanic was hosted from my house (we were very frugal) on my 100Mbps fiber connection via HFN, we made use of Route 53 for DNS and an EC2 server as a cold standby which we could fail over to.
Everything I operated at TecAlliance ran in multiple Regions and Availability Zones on AWS.
Operations
At Frugal Mechanic I used Ansible to manage our servers. It was also used initially at TecAlliance before I led the transition to Immutable Infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code via the Cloud Development Kit.
I was an early adopter of Docker at Frugal Mechanic and used it extensively at TecAlliance running containerized workloads on EC2, ECS and Fargate. It was also used for building our code base to give us a consistent build environment across Azure DevOps, CodeBuild and local builds.
I originally came across HAProxy while working at SecondSpace where I used it along with Keepalived to build a fully redundant Linux-based load balancing solution. Since then, I have used it at FrugalMechanic and TecAlliance for a variety of things.
Serialization Formats
Linux
I’ve been using Linux since the late 90s when I would install Red Hat Linux on old family computers while I was in High School. While I was at the University of Washington I built Linux router that load balanced 2 Speakeasy ADSL connections to provide internet for the fraternity house that I lived in.
I’ve used Linux everywhere I have worked and run multiple servers at my house.
Load Testing
I’m a huge fan of Gatling for load testing. I enjoy that it is written in Scala and uses a non-blocking architecture using Netty (which is what I used at FrugalMechanic and TecAlliance).
Java Libraries
I have worked with many Java libraries over the years. Only a few of them are included above. My favorites are in bold.
Version Control Systems
I first started playing around with Git while I was working at Amazon (which used Perforce internally).
When I first joined SecondSpace, they were using Visual Source Safe (yuk!). I convinced them to switch to Subversion since Visual Source Safe had problems with corruption and locking. Git wasn’t an option since there was poor Windows support at the time. However, I ended up using Git and git-svn via Cygwin since its hard to go back after using a DVCS like Git.