David Bushong

Career Goal:

Expertise:

• Software Development Python, Ruby, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Shell most recently, but a variety of things (C, Perl, Java, PHP, Haskell, CoffeeScript and more) in the past. I have extensive experience providing and consuming Web, REST, and GraphQL API services over HTTPS, as well as building CLI tools for automation and deployment of services and libraries. I am proficient with a very wide range of command line utilities, revision control systems (legacy and distributed), shells, compilers, and editors.
• Server Architecture Creating, modularizing, managing, and iterating on designs for horizontally scalable, high-traffic, high-availability infrastructure, operating across heterogeneous language environments.
• Web Development (HTML, TypeScript, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, (S)CSS, AJAX, CGI, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, (P)React, and back-end integration using Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Memcached, Redis, ElasticSearch, and MongoDB through Embperl, EPerl, and Mason with mod_perl, eRuby with mod_ruby, Rails 0.x - 6.x, Express with NodeJS, DropWizard, and Plone with Zope). I also have some image editing experience using The Gimp, and have additionally developed various back-end image generation tools (dynamic custom web-based chart/graphic creation and complex image creation and processing using ImageMagick).
• Release Management (CVS, Subversion, git, Mercurial, GitHub, Vagrant, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm) I have written release scripts using rsync and other tools to efficiently distribute trees of web data and code, as well as provided for near-zero-downtime rollback where possible. I variously designed or adopted numerous branching and tagging schemes for releases, development, and maintenance work. I have managed code releases to custom host, EC2 cluster, Heroku, and Kubernetes application servers and asset releases to various CDN services. I have built CI-based deployment pipelines from the ground up on Jenkins, and managed deployment of docker containers as Kubernetes pods on AWS. I have optimized existing Docker build stacks to reduce images sizes by 85%.
• Systems Administration I have an extensive background in systems administration of various Unix-like systems (Multiple Linux distributions, FreeBSD, Solaris, NetBSD, Digital Unix, and Ultrix). I'm comfortable with package managers, shared library management, Docker containers, and other basic systems-management tasks.
• Desktop Consulting working knowledge of MacOS, Windows, and Unity/Gnome Desktop environment on modern Linux distributions.

Work Experience:

• 10/2022 - Present
  Software Engineer on the Synchronizer Team at NexHealth. I'm working to increase developer velocity and help NexHealth realize its goal of providing world-class health record interoperability services. I have built custom developer tooling, both web and CLI, architected synchronization schemes and APIs, proposed coding and framework standards, and implemented and evangelized various best-in-class third-party tooling and practices, all with the end goal of unblocking NexHealth Developers to produce reliable products as quickly as possible.
• 1/2016 - 6/2020, 8/2021 - 10/2022
  Senior, Staff, and Senior Staff Engineer for Groupon, on the Interaction Tier (customer-facing web architecture) team. I variously architected, implemented, and maintained tooling and code frameworks that power virtually all public-facing Groupon web traffic around the world. I built and maintained tooling and lead a small team to manage 200+ GitHub repositories, more than 100 NPM packages (public & private), and deployment automation for 70+ different internal microservices running on NodeJS, ultimately targeting Kubernetes on AWS.
• 6/2020 - 8/2021
  Senior Staff Engineer at Transposit. I worked across the stack to ensure an amazing developer experience. I architected and contributed to development on a number of their recent features, including a developer-focused CLI, customer-facing realtime aggregated metrics, and a schema-driven parameterized attribute storage system. Outside of project work, I proposed, designed, and implemented internal automation to streamline developer environments and tooling.
• 12/2014 - 12/2015
  Team Lead and Engineering Manager for Groupon, on the Redemption Engineering team. I have served as a full-stack engineer, systems architect, team lead, and engineering manager. Our charter is to make the redemption process seamless, painless, and wonderful.
• 2/2013 - 12/2014
  Senior Development Engineer for Groupon, working on improving their deal redemption rate. I have contributed to Groupon's novel NodeJS front-end web architecture, as well as architected and implemented portions of a next-generation caching API aggregation proxy. I rewrote and took over development of Groupon's primary web tier deployment tool for NodeJS applications, developing it into a promises-based, modular, multi-thousand-line CoffeeScript server management toolset.
• 11/2011 - 2/2013
  Engineering Team Lead for Britely, a service focused on providing beautiful ways to read, learn, and remember. I scoped, managed, and implemented fast-turnaround prototypes with scalable architecture considerations, using CoffeeScript, SCSS, HTML, MongoDB, Rails, NodeJS, Express, and numerous cloud services.
• 3/2008 - 11/2011
  Senior Web Developer for MashLogic, a Silicon Valley startup focusing on enhancing the end-user browsing experience. I worked with every aspect of the service, from browser add-on JavaScript to front-end JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and image-editing through backend C++, Perl, Rails, and Java web services, through EC2 systems administration.
• 3/2005 - 3/2008
  Senior Web Applications Engineer for AvantGo, the service for mobile content distribution owned and operated by iAnywhere, Inc., a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc. I worked with a small team designing new applications and backend support infrastructure for AvantGo's 7 million user advertising-supported service.
• 11/2002 - 3/2005
  Senior Systems Administrator / Web Developer for Media Net Link, Inc., a consulting firm in San Ramon providing "web services for business". I worked in network architecture, server security, and web applications development.
• 4/2002 - 11/2002
  Independent Consultant providing systems administration and software development services to a range of clients.
• 11/1998 - 4/2002
  Systems Administrator/Web Applications Developer for Euphorion (formerly DataMain), Inc. (No longer in business), an e-business solutions provider based out of Milpitas, CA. I handled planning, consultation, and implementation of security and high availability networked solutions and did part-time programming of fast turnaround, resource efficient, web-based applications. Additionally, I managed much of the internal IT infrastructure necessary to provide transparent, secure access to intra and extranet data.

Projects:

esfixup

A command-line utility to perform multiple automated code transforms for JavaScript or similar languages:

• CoffeeScript → JavaScript: starting with decaffeinate & adding advanced cleanups
• Modern JS features: convert legacy code to use modern syntax or library features
• Lodash removal: converts unnecessary lodash code to modern JS equivalents
• phy conversion: ports JSX & legacy h() calls to use the phy library
• JavaScript → TypeScript: converts JSDoc-contained type hints into their TS equivalents
• ...and more

Used: JavaScript, NPM

GitHub CLI Extensions: bulk-pr and grep

Extensions for the official GitHub CLI to support opening automated PRs against multiple repositories and performing shell `grep`-style searching. These started their lives as part of a multi-command `gh` CLI internal to Groupon, and were Open Sourced to be compatible with the new official `gh` CLI. Used: TypeScript

Git Workflow CLI

A git plugin (git wf) for managing a scalable branch/release workflow and automating common GitHub-related flows (creating feature branch from existing branch, opening PRs against proper parent branch, cleaning up afterwards. Used: JavaScript, NPM

Automated Workflow Provisioner

A system for automating various onboarding tasks to move between deployment platforms at Groupon. Included a number of novel features:

• Modeled steps using flowchart metaphors in code
• Graphed the derived flowchart using Graphviz
• Automated steps using local CLI tools and remote APIs
• Tracked progress inside a master JIRA ticket for easy non-developer visibility
• All progress idempotent, making execution simple
• Created sub-tickets & PRs as necessary for non-automatable tasks

Used: JavaScript, NPM

Napistrano

A JavaScript/Promises-based deployment toolset used by most web-tier applications at Groupon. I inherited and rewrote the project from the ground up to be modular and handle a variety of error conditions gracefully and safely. Used: JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Mocha

BetterLinks Server Backend

A high-performance REST service which aggregated requests to multiple backend data sources, including a C++ term extractor, Java semantic relevance engine, third party advertising APIs, Squid HTTP proxies, PostgreSQL database, Memcache, and more. I architected the basic backend structure, specified and contracted out some of the early technical components, and integrated all the pieces, including 2 iterations of an extremely high-volume stats-management framework, monitoring, reporting, and release management. Used: PHP, PostgreSQL, C++, Memcache, Redis, Java, JSON, Squid, Varnish, nginx, CRUSH tools, Hive, Tokyo Cabinet, EC2, Apache, rrdtool, Munin, Nagios, SVN, Haskell, Perl, Bourne Shell, Avro

SmartLinks/BetterLinks Browser Add-on

A streamlined version of the MashLogic add-on, the BetterLinks add-on did only link injection, but supported Chrome, Firefox, and MSIE 7+. The SmartLinks variant had to be a resuable, injectable codebase that could be included in other Firefox or Chrome add-ons, manage robust stats collection, and fail gracefully. I worked on all versions, and architected the message bus system needed to do secure communication between the various privilege layers of the Chrome extension. Used: JavaScript, JSON, CSS

MashLogic Browser Add-on

Once described as a "swiss-army knife for the web", I worked on the architecture for this multi-purpose browser add-on. The final version had an installable sub-module architecture which interfaced with custom web-pages via backchannel messaging, and supported a number of modules, including currency convertion, unit conversion, Wikipedia linking, ad-removal, and more. Used: JavaScript, CSS

Mason Components for AJAX

I gave a 45-minute presentation at OSCON 2006 on how to use Mason components to build AJAX applications through good design and effective code reuse. Used: HTML::Mason, JavaScript, S5

AvantGo for RSS

This feature allows RSS feeds to be synchronized to a handheld device for offline viewing. Challenges included the need for extensive, multi-level caching for performance and to avoid overfetching feeds from sensitive RSS providers, parsing of often poorly formatted data, and finding ways to provide easy implementation of the feature in the existing server framework. Used: Perl, HTML::Mason, JavaScript, MySQL, Memcache, RSS

AvantGo Travel Tab

The AvantGo Travel Tab feature allows PDA users to pull down an offline cached copy of their travel itineraries, as well as weather, maps, and city guide information (restaurants, attractions, etc.) pertinent to their travel destinations. Challenges included retrieving and normalizing data feeds from various Travel Providers, as well as integrating numerous other data types into an efficiently downloadable and navigable UI. Used: Perl, HTML::Mason, JavaScript, MySQL, Memcache, XML, SOAP

Wordsy

Wordsy is a playalike to the Yahoo! "TextTwist" game, but implemented entirely using AJAX, DHTML, and a simple Perl backend, integrating a third-party Java applet for optional sound support. Used: Perl, JavaScript

Dogtivities

I originally wrote the PHP Event Calendar backend for this for use with Danville.com. For Dogtivities (with permission from Media Net Link), I rewrote the code to be more modular and to cater to the specific needs of the site. Used: PHP, MySQL

Baagle Desktop Search

Built in a weekend on a dare, this is a workalike to Google Desktop Search that works on UN*X systems. It uses existing Open Source indexing and conversion software, but provides an easy-to-use web frontend to access the results, without the need for a separate webserver. Used: Perl

Floating Sheep Wishlist

I designed the backend database schema and core logic for this generic wishlist system. Interesting features include: heuristic page scraping, hidden automatic "learning" customization of some interface features to the individual user, a simple generic PHP PearDB abstraction layer-based database session storage layer, a HTML::Mason-like args() functionality to provide register_globals-like simple access to variables in a secure fashion, and a reuse of my styled-font image generation and caching system. Used: PHP, MySQL

AthenaRMS

I worked on the 5.0 Open Source release of the Athena Request Management System software, performing a complete security audit. I wrote the installation system and wrote the release management scripts. I implemented some of the advanced configurability features for the 5.1 release, and worked on an upgrade/XML data transport import/export utility. Used: PHP

XML::Aggregator

This system allows you to extract content from any unstructured data source (e.g. a website) and publish it to any XML DTD you specify in an automated manner. Great for extracting real estate listings, job listings, RSS news feeds, or just about any sort of repetitive data whose format you can't control. The core module is Perl, the web interface uses HTML::Mason

Euphorion Performance Tester

Fully configurable custom load tester. Uses multiprocess communication, locking, and database files efficiently to achieve and sustain a high number of parallel connections to a webserver, simulating any sort of user session desirable. Targeted towards evaluating application server page (Java, Perl, ASP, etc) performance. Used: straight perl

Euphorion Client Extranet

Working with the UI design team, built a complete extranet interface for Euphorion's clients to securely access files, project member information, and mailing lists. Features included: Windows filesharing access for Euphorion staff, web upload capability for client, complete administrative control via the web, no back-end database needed, all information encapsulated in client directories, full per-client authentication and external anonymity (no one client can see what the others are). Used: HTML::Mason

Mason Gallery

My own take on automatic thumbnail generation: simply create a directory and toss images to it under the /pics tree and they are automatically accessible (no index.html or anything needed). Pages are cached efficiently and only regenerated when necessary. Other features include JPEG Exif data and thumbnail extraction, RSS feed, and simple search. Used: HTML::Mason

Comics Page

A configurable, databased-backed, multi-user comics page system for my private use. Contact me for a demonstration. Does many interesting things with caching and failure management. Also provides an RSS feed for use with rich aggregators. Used: HTML::Mason

Temperature Page

This application combines a back-end cron job to gather temperature data with a simple front-end graphing page. Used: Ruby, Rails, RRDtool

Education:

UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.
Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science Emphasis, received 12/1998
Course-work included:

• Data Structures: emphasis on C++ data structures
• Machine Structures: emphasis on C and MIPS R3000 assembler
• Operating Systems: emphasis on threads and concurrency in C++
• Database Management Systems: emphasis on RDBMS
• Programming Languages and Compilers: emphasis on OO language design
• Foundations of Computer Graphics: emphasis on 3-D modeling. Also see the project home page
• Components and Design Techniques for Digital Systems: emphasis on efficiency in logic design
• Engineering Economics: emphasis of practical aspects of engineering cost structures
• Software Engineering: emphasis on group dynamics and modular design. Also see project home page.
• Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems: emphasis on sound computer theory