San Jose, CA, USA
| max-resume@alcyone.com | |
| WEB | http://www.alcyone.com/ |
| /in/erikmaxfrancis/ | |
| X/TWITTER | @erikmaxfrancis |
| JABBER | erikmaxfrancis |
| SKYPE | erikmaxfrancis |
| UPDATED | 2024 Dec 13 |
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Erik Max Francis
San Jose, CA, USA |
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To obtain gainful employment in a challenging position at a forward-looking company, utilizing my particular skills and talents under a Unix, Linux, Unix-like, or platform-agnostic environment. I'm passionate about learning and particularly enjoy building frameworks and complex software from scratch.
| Senior Software Engineer — CloudBees, Inc. (San Jose, CA) | (2019–) |
Contributed to CloudBees Build Acceleration (formerly Accelerator), a mature product with substantial annually recurring revenue that accelerates GNU Make and Ninja builds via automatic parallelization of jobs. Build Acceleration consists of a client (eMake) written in C++, an agent also written in C++, and a coordinating server (Cluster Manager) written in Java. Also involved are two kernel modules, EFS (Electric Filesystem) and LOFS (Loopback Filesystem), to help detect affected files during a build and to separate build sandboxes for agents running on the same host, respectively. Eventually took over sole maintenance of the entire product, investigating and addressing customer bug reports, adding support for new versions of operating systems and kernel versions as they were released, implementing new features when needed or requested, keeping up with features in newer versions of GNU Make, and updating the documentation and release notes for each new release. Implemented ongoing support for acceleration of new releases of Android (AOSP) (largely written in Go) and Yocto (BitBake) builds (written in Python), including a great deal of feature additions and modernization for Yocto support. Maintained and updated documentation for product for new releases and on an ongoing basis. Also took over quality assurance role. Got up to speed on already-existing continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) system (using CloudBees CD/RO), including unit, integration and system tests and took over full maintenance, expansion, and updating of said system, all running on Google Compute Platform. Prototyped acceleration support for Java tests via JUnit 4 and 5. Designed and implemented Moxie, a portable build simulator written in C89 that can simulate any build given a specification file to demonstrate real-world parallelization on a Build Acceleration cluster but requires almost no CPU usage. Build specifications can be created from existing builds or from scratch. Telecommuted.
| Senior Software Engineer — Ultimate Gaming [formerly CyberArts], Inc. (Emeryville, CA) | (2003–2014) |
Designed, implemented and maintained a highly-multithreaded poker server as part of a server suite for a next-generation online gaming platform, Foundation, written in Standard C++ under Linux. Handled the full lifecycle from design, implementation, bugfixing, release, through to maintenance. Was personally and solely responsible for all poker game logic and user interface associated with the poker table, given an extremely thin and portable (Windows, Macintosh, Flash) client. Engineered the server to be very modular, easily accommodating the addition of new poker variants, resulting in a poker gaming platform offering the widest variety available in the market. Designed the system to be fully localizable and skinnable from a data-driven source. Assisted with the design and structure of the XML-based client-server protocol, as well as the architecture of Foundation, the full server suite. Advised on the design of the other server components, including the CORBA interfaces and SQL schemas needed for their interactions. Assisted with the creation of a Game Developers Kit, allowing customers to independently write their own games. Helped with user interface design. Delivered stable software with very long uptimes, even initially with no dedicated quality assurance resources. Met demands for customization and feature requests for numerous customers with aggressive, rapidly-changing, and often overlapping schedules. Wrote a high-performance client library in Python for testing the server through the use of bots, as well as for other ad hoc tools. Achieved hightened performance through multiple forked asynchronous (event-based) cores able to run high-level scripts using threads. Wrote emulator for backward compatibility with legacy Python scripts. Designed and implemented the Player Segmentation Module API designed to allow administrators to efficiently specify groups of players through well-defined criteria. Created a domain-specific language to specify these criteria inspired by set theory which would compile the queries to actual SQL queries and wrappers. Used SQL optimization techniques to make the queries efficient despite their sometimes high complexity. Integrated an XMPP client library and exposed an XMPP API for developers. Switched over to agile methodologies and converted the poker server to support a later thick HTML5 client using a JSON-based protocol. Also performed technical interviews. Joined the company as employee number 4 under NDA for the first year as part of a stealth startup. Telecommuted.
| Senior Computer Scientist — Adobe Systems, Inc. (San Jose, CA) | (2003–2004) |
Returned to the Advanced Technology Group as a contractor to design and implement SVG Renderer, a portable (Linux, Solaris, Windows, Macintosh) Python application using the SVG core library, in order to render SVG documents to a variety of image formats via the Python Imaging Library (PIL). Created the application to be used as a standalone rasterizing utility; an HTTP server which, when provided an SVG document via a POST query, would rasterize the document and respond with the resulting image; as an HTTP client that would interact with an SVG Renderer server, and locally manipulating the resulting rasterized image; and as a Python module. Telecommuted.
| Computer Scientist — Adobe Systems, Inc. (San Jose, CA) | (2000–2001) |
Ported the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) core engine written in C++ to Linux and Solaris (from Windows and Macintosh), making possible the SVG Linux viewer for Mozilla. Implemented and maintained a company-wide, portable (Linux, Solaris, Windows, Macintosh) API for SVG rendering and importing, utilized by multiple Adobe applications, including Illustrator and Photoshop. Ported an automated build validation tool written in Python to Linux and Solaris, which ran against every change entered into source control. Wrote an automated test system in Python to render a suite of test files and interactively display differences from the blessed testcases through a simple GUI. Provided expertise in C and C++ Standards conformance and portability. Partially telecommuted.
| Computer Scientist — Adobe Systems, Inc. (San Jose, CA) | (1995–1998) |
Quickly and simultaneously learned the Adobe Illustrator 5.5 and 6.0 plugin API (Macintosh), the latter of which was under heavy development at the time. Worked with a small team to obtain basic testing of the entire API of over 500 calls, as well as depth and applied testing over the most important calls, including several complete plugin features. Also developed a rapid prototype in Java for a research project which converted Illustrator documents to class files runnable as browser applets. Later, developed and maintained internal functionality and plugins for Illustrator 7.0 and 8.0 (Windows and Macintosh) in C and C++. Responsibilities included general rasterizing libraries, raster file formats (most prominently GIF and JPEG), Web features (including hyperlinks and imagemaps), Smart Guides, and transformation and shape tools.