Marcus F. Kazmierczak
Maya's Mom was acquired by BabyCenter in August 2007, I moved to the Director of Engineering role at BabyCenter becoming a key member of the management team, a active and critical role in product and strategy ideas, direction and decisions.
Expanded our development team from two engineers up to a team of seven engineers, hiring a mix of contractors and full time engineers; as well as bringin on additional support staff of QA, Operations and Release Engineering.
Successfully integrated the Maya's Mom technology to become the new BabyCenter Community, including new design, a unified single-sign on system and migrating the already large established BabyCenter Community off the old bulletin board system to the new social network platform.
Lead the development and design of building out a robust Infrastructure to support a much larger audience, including building a state-of-the-art photo storage system leveraging Amazon's S3, a new transactional e-mail system and implementing caching and messaging systems to support the increased load.
Lead the design and development of several features for the BabyCenter Community including:
Key leadership role and first employee. Recruited, built and manage a lean, agile and highly productive technology team of three. Represent the technical side of the company in all meetings with investors and business partners.
Lead architect and engineer for the extensive social networking platform that powers the premier community for parents online. The MVC architecture, based on Zend Framework, is designed to provide maximum efficiency of developer resources allowing the team to build new user features quickly.
Expert knowledge of the new social internet space. Parlayed this community expertise into real features: interoperability with external sources via RSS feeds, video, and photo imports; external data feeds from web service APIs; plus a deep focus on the user needs such as customization, usability and listening to their feedback.
Key member of the product team that sets direction and features for the overall site. Work with parents and advisors for determining customer needs and testing for feasibility and usability.
Set up and deployed entire production and development server environments. A multi-tiered server deployment of Apache Web servers, a MySQL database and replica, as well as Tomcat/Lucene search via web services.
Lead developer of Haystack, a large-scale storage solution for WebShots, a photo sharing network with nearly 400 million photos. Haystack is now being used to handle CNET's allyoucanupload.webshots.com service.
Developed a new storage solution to gracefully handle redundancy, hardware failures and load balancing, replacing an outdated storage solution that was pushing the limits of manageability, reliability and capacity.
Developed server management and packaging systems using Python, Bash and RPM, simplifying future work for adding new hardware to further increase capacity.
Developed client/server software which interfaces with Web front end file upload in Python.
More information on Haystack is available at CNET SVP Martin Green's blog article:
http://martingreen.typepad.com/forward_looking_statement/2006/06/more_on_haystac.html
Managed a new department of five software engineers formed to improve development environments, testing and automation of software development across the enterprise.
Partnered with technology leadership to define the mission and goals of the department, and devise its structure and style.
Led team in effort to break up monolithic source code tree into manageable packages; defined structure, process and organization for handling new packages.
Implemented internal developer tools for software development, including Wiki collaboration tools, bug tracking and document sharing.
Project and technical lead for Linux Migration
Converted the complete primary site (www.etrade.com) Web, Application and Transaction servers from running on Sun/Solaris to an Intel/Linux platform. In the process, we converted the proprietary server software to an open source solution using Apache and Tomcat.
Saved the company ~$12 million annually in hardware, operating and licensing costs. The conversion to Linux also increased performance and reliability.
E*TRADE was one of the early large-scale web sites, especially financial services, to adopt Linux. The success of this project led to numerous magazine articles and features on the company as a technology leader.
Project and technical lead for Site Performance Project
Improved performance metrics to beat out competition as the top performing brokerage site, as measured by Keynote Systems.
Partnered with architecture, system engineers and web development to improve overall site performance by more than 50% while maintaining the reliability and availability expected from a major online brokerage company.
Principal Intranet Engineer
Developed a web based "Customer Request Tracking" application, in Cold Fusion, for Hewlett Packard's IT department.
Created an on-line company store for Altera using JavaScript and cookies.
Developed "Start Using JavaScript" course, which is a corporate education training course on JavaScript programming.
Developed a Perl database workshop, which taught the students how to use Perl to communicate with ODBC databases.
Implemented a searchable browser based staff directory database, for use on the department's web page and intranet.
Developed and demonstrated a prototype e-commerce solution for publication sales.
Created an interactive private conference forum on the department's intranet for the managers to collaborate and discuss issues.
Administration, coordination and training of the 25+ web team members involved in the publishing of the department's public web site and internal intranet.