Beau Lebens
Personal Details
Objective
To be involved in producing exciting solutions to some of the many problems that plague us online and off. I am a dedicated, passionate and talented LAMP/web developer who loves working on social media, community-oriented systems and enabling technologies that work for you, rather than against you. I want to get back into doing something I love, where I don't care that I'm working until late into the night, because I'm surrounded by people I enjoy spending my time with, and I'm doing something that I actually believe in.
Professional Experience
Automattic is a completely distributed company which runs WordPress.com, Gravatar, Akismet, IntenseDebate, PollDaddy and a number of other extremely popular web services/applications. My role is varied and constantly changing, but focuses around delivering code that is massively scalable in a continuous deployment environment. I work on a LAMP-ish stack, with a lot of Javascript on the front end. I manage a team of engineers/designers from around the world.
Writing custom WordPress plugins, managing a large WP installation and keeping one of the biggest tech news blogs on the Internet online. I debugged/customized existing plugins, tuned and improved the performance of the site and servers and was generally responsible for debugging (or writing from scratch) and making sure that new features were added in a timely fashion and that they worked as expected. Since this was almost all WordPress work, it was exclusively on the LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP), although we used lighttpd as the web server in this case.
Creating an online scrapbooking/community site targeted at parents and family. Based entirely on WordPressMU and bbPress (integrated and massively customized through plugins/additional functionality). Storage hosted on Amazon S3, with extensive use of AJAX in the UI via jQuery and Prototype/Scriptaculous. Careful use of PHP/MySQL, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript in a cross-browser environment. Source control and a build/deploy process were built and used throughout.
Managed all technology-related operations of company measuring annual revenues in the millions. Lead up to three other developers and created and/or worked on all back-end systems handling millions of clicks worth of traffic per month. Built systems allowing the company to track and sell traffic being delivered to clients. Built back-end systems using PHP/MySQL/Bash Scripting etc, front-ends using XHTML/JS/CSS/XML/XSLT. Managed web and database servers, including MySQL replication and server redundancy. Interfaced with vendors and managed all technical supplies.
Worked on a complex cluster of load-balanced web servers delivering high-availability, high-load content globally. Worked with credit card processing systems (iBill and EPOCH/PayCom), built systems coded in PHP and using XML and XSLT, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. Created system maintenance tools and scheduled their operation to ensure maximum uptime. Built a variety of bulk-processing systems to handle data conversion/modification and reporting.
Managed production and creation of all online courses for the Learning Technologies group within the Science and Mathematics Education Center, catering exclusively to post-graduate students working towards Masters and Doctoral qualifications. Planned and executed a complete migration of all content to clean XHTML and CSS presentation. Guided production of course-ware in CD-ROM and booklet form. Built our student information management system (using PHP/MySQL) which integrated with phpBB to provide both front end (student-facing) and back end (office-facing interfaces for managing student information, communications, assessable work, outgoing physical mail records and complex reporting systems) operations.
Education/Certifications/Affiliations
Technical Skills
- Mac OS X
- Expert, using currently and for 6 years.
- Windows 3.11/NT4/95/98/ME/2000/XP
- Not currently using, expert in listed versions.
- (X)HTML
- Expert, using currently and for 11 years (HTML → XHTML).
- CSS
- Expert, using currently and for 10 years.
- JavaScript/ECMAScript
- Intermediate, using currently and for 9 years.
- AJAX
- Intermediate, using currently and for 3 years.
- MySQL
- Intermediate/Advanced, using currently and for 10 years.
- PHP(4/5)
- Expert, using currently and for 10 years.
- XML/XSL(T)
- Intermediate, used previously for 4 years.
- Apache (config/rewrites/etc)
- Intermediate, using currently and for 10 years.
- Lighttpd
- Beginner, used for 6 months, not currently.
- Windows Networking
- Intermediate, used previously for 12 years.
- BSD/RedHat/Gentoo/Linux/CentOS
- Intermediate, using currently and for 7 years.
Career Information
- Work Status
- I am authorized to work for any employer in the US or Australia.
- Target Job Titles
- Web Developer/Engineer, Technology Evangelist, Internet Strategist, Director of Technology, Chief Technology Officer.
- Company Size
- Smaller is better -- Startups are perfect.
- Preferred Location
- San Francisco/New York/Global/Distributed.
- Willing to Travel
- Absolutely.
- Telecommute?
- Sure. I've worked solely from a laptop for the last few years and 100% "remote" for 3+ years. It's all in the communication.
Background & Interests
In the years since I started playing and working online, I've worked on a number of exciting and popular projects including; writing probably the most popular PHP code library for interfacing with the Blogger API, working with a developer in Denmark to build a community project around reviewing each others' blogs, writing a mini search engine completely in JavaScript, having my writing published in an e-business magazine in Australia, in Google Hacks (published by O'Reilly), and included or mentioned in a number of online articles, writing an XML-wrapper for the Google Web Search API and more recently releasing the first near-complete PHP class(es) for interfacing with Atom API-enabled platforms as well as a new version of my popular complete online text editor that uses that library to allow it to post to a number of popular blog platforms.
Technology/Concepts I'm Interested In: WordPress, bbPress, Microformats, jQuery, REST, semantics, search, search-marketing, web metrics, AJAX, web services, Amazon Web Services/cloud services, scaling, online culture, community-building, memes, game dynamics.
Personally: I love hiking, back-packing and camping and used to get out mountain biking a lot more. I'm a volunteer for a disaster response organization in San Francisco, and am interested in the concepts of community-level self-sufficiency. I have a penchant for quality writing instruments, and I enjoy playing poker and drinking tea (and coffee, of course, but mainly espresso-based drinks rather than drip/filter). I have trained in a few different styles of martial arts, the most recent of which is my favorite; Krav Maga.
