LinkedIn
Developer Advocate
01/2011 to Present
As a developer advocate at LinkedIn, I am dedicated to helping our internal and external developers successfully create applications using the LinkedIn API platform.
Highlights:
This role includes interacting with the developers on the forum. I frequently provide pointers to documentation, triage bugs, offer code examples, and explain our system to keep people from getting stuck. I write and update documentation on our Developer Portal, including tutorials, reference materials and example code. I recently wrote a new tutorial system for the Javascript API, and documentation and code samples for several of our other platform products. I work with LinkedIn partners to help them develop excellent LinkedIn applications using the API. For both partners and open developers, I bring feedback back to our development team to help guide decisions on future improvements.
I speak at conferences and meetups to educate and engage developers with the LinkedIn API. I have given presentations at various events, including the Silicon Valley iOS Developer Meetup, the Semantic Web Meetup, the DataInsight Hackathon and Silicon Valley Code Camp. My talks range from overviews of our platform to hands-on workshops. I’m comfortable speaking in front of small and large groups, and am an engaging and entertaining speaker, interacting with the audience during and after the presentation.
My blog has code tutorials, musings on general topics, and other examples of my particular thought patterns. Recent posts have included:
Netflix
Lead API Certification Engineer
08/2009 to 12/2010
In this role, I am primarily responsible for certifying third party API-based applications. I also lead our community developer support efforts.
Highlights:
- I perform general developer support for our partners and open developer community - documenting our APIs, best practices and code samples, answering developer forum questions, and triaging/reporting issues found by our community. I attend conferences to evangelize our APIs and help inspire developers to build applications. In addition, my personal blog also has articles with code samples to help other developers over hurdles, such as Creating Netflix Widgets from Freebase Queries and Accessing Amazon’s Product Advertising API with Python
- I frequently support REST and platform team members by troubleshooting, bug fixing, and participating in the design and implementation of new API features.
- As part of our OData effort, I worked closely with the Microsoft team to develop the Netflix OData API, documented it for our developers, and attended the MIX conference to discuss and encourage developers to try this new API. I also provided data to the Metaweb team so they could include Netflix keys in their database, making it possible for developers to more easily create applications combining both APIs.
- For Netflix' internal Hack Day, I created Adaptations, an application linking movies with the books they were adapted from and the soundtracks for those movies, using Freebase, Amazon's API, the Netflix API, and Google's App Engine - which I presented at a Freebase meetup.
- As a side project, I created an iPad application (and am working on a jquery version) using the Freebase and Netflix APIs and presented it at a Google meetup.
- I participated as a panelist in Mashery's Web API Panel at the 2010 Web 2.0 Expo.
Applied Minds, Inc.
Lead Developer
09/2007 to 08/2009
At this innovative thinktank, I led a team tasked with finding ways to encourage users to explore complex interconnected data.
Highlights:
- I led a team which built an engaging graphical user interface on top of a complex database. I worked closely with the team for our prototype database system to help them isolate bugs, specify requirements, and create solutions. I used Django (python) as the framework for the website and created a REST API on top of the database which clients could use to access and update the data. Once this was in place, my team created a Flex-based application to allow users to interact with the content in an engaging and fun way.
- AMI spends a great deal of time creating computationally expensive prototypes for our partners, so cloud computing is a very attractive option. I created prototypes for our demos using the Amazon cloud services, including a database system and a parallel processing system using hadoop. Once these were in place I created various performance and cost assessments to help the company determine how we could use it for our projects.
- Created a prototype Flickr viewer similar to cover flow, as well as some similar catalog browsing prototypes. I also created a configurable version of Freebase's venturespin.
- Experimented with and created extensive reports about various potential application platforms, including the iPhone and Facebook. Created an OpenGL visualization for another team's high-level demo.
- Additionally, I installed and configured internal collaboration tools for various AMI project teams to use, and provided technical support, suggestions, and feedback on multiple other projects.