Brian Holtz

Los Altos Hills, CA
 650-305-0585 brian@holtz.org

Objective

Senior engineer in a fun smart team working in Silicon Valley to build and deliver innovative high-quality software in a flexible achievement-oriented work environment for a company with a clear technological vision.

Skills

Constructive and positive team player with superb analytic and communications skills, specializing in architecting and implementing interfaces for network-based services using object-oriented languages and open networking technologies.

Experience

2011 - Kabam

I now work at Kabam, so I'm not currently in the job market.

2010 - 2011: Yahoo! Open Social

2002 - 2009: Yahoo! Personals

Responsible for engineering efforts to detect, monitor, and automatically defeat various kinds of attempts to abuse our service (e.g. spam, fraudulent profiles).  Responsible for SOX-compliant integration with credit card and billing systems.

Led rearchitecting of Y! Personals mailbox system to replace NFS-based storage with MySQL.  800K unique users/day view 3M pages/day and send 300K msgs/day, involving 5M mailboxes containing 500GB of user data. Launched new architecture transparently without service interruption.

Designed/implemented live data integration with our email marketing partners (first Digital Impact, now CheetahMail). Designed/implemented site and data integration with our affiliate-management partner (Commission Junction).  Advised other Yahoo properties on how to re-use my integration framework.

Designed/implemented Y! Messenger Personals search plug-in (in JavaScript) and the web services (in PHP) that it used.

1999 - 2001 Sun: Webtop Applications

Led StarSync project (4 engineers), which built a SyncML-compliant HTTP service (using Apache/Tomcat/JAXP) for XML-based synchronization of folders and documents between the SunONE Webtop and two different clients, one for Win32/Unix using JDK1.2 and the other for PalmOS. Designed algorithms (three U.S. patents submitted) and XML DTD for content synchronization. Implemented client- and server-side Java classes for change detection, synchronization, and conflict resolution.

1993 - 1999 Sun: Desktop Technologies

Led Solaris Desktop Extensions project (5 engineers), which used Win32 & Java to add to Solaris 8 a PC Launcher (for opening apps/docs in Win32 hw or sw emulators) and a Java media player. For Solaris 7, the project created an address mgr (sdtname), process mgr (sdtprocess), file finder, and window mgr graphical customizer. Coded sdtname and sdtprocess using C++ and Motif.

Designed and helped implement the incorporation of ToolTalk into the window mgr, file mgr, action system, Korn shell, & app builder of CDE (the Sun/HP/IBM COSE standard desktop). Authored ToolTalk and Open Protocols (SunSoft Press, 1994). Designed and implemented integration of CDE file mgr with removable media (e.g. floppies, CDs) in Solaris 2.6.

1990 - 1993 Sun: DOE (Distributed Objects Everywhere)

Designed, implemented, and evangelized the ToolTalk interfaces adopted for the ANSI X3H6 CASE IPC standard. Designed and evangelized TT interfaces incorporated into Sun's Workshop and DeskSet products. Helped implement TT features, MT-safeness, performance, security, and bugfixing. Helped create transition strategy from TT to DOMF (Sun's CORBA ORB).

Helped develop ToolTalk 1.0: Sun's C++-based cross-platform middleware for IPC among persistent distributed objects. Designed and implemented remote API and message tracing; integrated Unix file utilities with TT persistent objects. Created ttsh scripting shell and CoEd, an open-source groupware editor demo.

1988 - 1990 U. of Michigan

M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, minor emphasis in software engineering. As an RA, developed the distributed editing engine for ShrEdit, a MacOS groupware editor. Was a TA for introductory computer science.

1983 - 1987 U. of S. Mississippi

B.S. in Computer Science in USM Honors College, with Mathematics minor.

Patents, Publications, External Presentations