Erik Robin Ogan

App Genius

Ruby-on-Rails architect and developer for social media applications on the Facebook Platform.

• Designed and built the #1 highest-volume, non-game application on the Facebook Platform.
• Conceived, developed, and maintained high-volume, high-availability Ruby-on-Rails applications leveraging Memcached, Redis, Resque, and Sphinx.
• Collaborated in agile, cross-functional teams at every step of an application lifecycle: inception, design, architecture, implementation, release, and maintenance. Mentored and guided junior developers.
• Company-wide revision control guru. Provided training, advice, support, and assistance for our Git and Subversion repositories.
• Account management liaison for Fortune 500 clients, including J. P. Morgan Chase, Safeway, and LG.

Founding Principal

Numerous short- to mid-term projects in enterprise web development and software engineering for many clients including CloudShield Technologies, the Netscape product division of AOL/Time Warner.

• Author and maintainer of the official Phusion Passenger RPM packages for RedHat / Fedora-based Linux distributions.
• Created a Ruby-on-Rails based recommendation engine that generated user enthusiasm and loyalty, driving an increase in transactions.
• Considerably improved developer productivity and added consistency to a custom build process by adding local extensions to the RedHat Enterprise Linux Anaconda Python install system.
• Built a custom MovableType plugin to post entry data to a database via XML-RPC.
• Added an offline LDAP cache to the address book of a cross-platform messaging suite. Heavily optimized this feature for database scalability.
• Saved several person-weeks of duplicated effort with the design and implementation of shared, cross-application preferences for the above suite. Commended for the ingenuity and clarity of this solution.

Primary Developer

Built and maintained a Ruby-on-Rails social media platform to plot the stories that bring us all together.

• Removed several application bottlenecks. For instance, the server backend and rendering time for the primary Flex widget was reduced from over 30 seconds to under 1 second, reversing user perceptions of the widget from “broken” to responsive, directly contributing to a dramatic uptrend in participation.
• Converted the entire application from Markaby templates to Haml/Sass. This simplified the templates and reduced errors, as well as reducing development time for front-end features.
• Collaborated in a small, agile team delivering rapidly prototyped and deployed solutions in an RSpec-based, Behavior-Driven Development environment.

Senior Applications Engineer

Rapidly prototyped and built complete customer solutions and platform customization including web user interfaces, reference implementations, and SDK components for the CA-5000 and CS-2000 Deep Packet Processing hardware and software platforms.

• Founding chairman of the Architectural Review Committee. Established a formal design methodology balancing the need for process against the required agility of a small company.
• Integration Team Lead for three years. Responsible for code quality, integration testing, requirements and standards compliance verification, project management and final sign-off.
• Trained and mentored junior developers in agile methodologies, object-oriented and database design.
• Completely automated the creation of virtual machines with custom software for delivery to customers. Provided process repeatability, considerably reducing errors and simplifying QA test requirements.
• Designed and built a pluggable framework for network applications providing device management, scheduling, and charting. This feature allowed developers to focus on the unique aspects of their particular feature, and saved significant development time on several applications.
• Led the Common Criteria EAL4+ security certification of the software for the CS-2000 product line.
• Designed user interfaces with Ruby-on-Rails, Java, PHP, and CGI; built Eclipse plugins and RDP applications; remote interfaces with SOAP; system programming in C, C++, Perl, Python, and shell; ported Linux kernel modules from 2.4 to 2.6; and added SELinux strict refpolicy definitions for custom software; and built deep-packet processing modules in CloudShield RAVE.

Senior Web Engineer

Developed the Topica Email Publisher web application, including tools for its support, maintenence, and testing. Mentored junior developers in software engineering, object-oriented and database design.

• Increased QA productivity several-fold by creating a test suite harness for web applications that simulated complete user sessions, modifying behavior based on responses. The tool reduced test-case creation time from days or weeks to hours. Further, test modularization allowed for substantial reuse.
• Built the first revenue-generating product in less than 30 days when it was crucial for company survival.
• Spearheaded the “impossible” project to bring our large, mod_perl-based application into strict pragma compliance. This process identified and corrected many long-hidden problems, and enabled the team to discover defects in new development much earlier, thereby saving time and greatly improving quality.

1998 - 1999
Lead System Software Engineer — Content Management System

Retooled the custom web content management system for Quicken.com from the inside out to better accommodate and anticipate user needs.

• Revolutionized the application workflow by adding a test suite with page previews, notably for user specified dates, substantially reducing errors in the entire process.
• Improved data file generation process performance by more than an order of magnitude by refactoring the monolithic, complex display engine into a collection of small, versatile components.

1997 - 1998
System Software Engineer — Quicken.com Infrastructure Group

Developed and extended tools and systems for the diverse partner sites of the Quicken Financial Network.

• Anticipated a need for, and rapidly developed and deployed a browser-based, data file management system.
• Took initiative and control of key critical path tasks to ensure an on-time delivery of a major software release.

Webmaster / System Programmer

Investigated, evaluated, customized, and authored server software and tools for the NETworth websites. Instituted, automated, and improved many processes, including link integrity spider and concurrent version control. Greatly reduced both turnaround time for content update and the number of errors in the system.