Brian Picciano

8 years of experience across backend systems, databases, and application development. Passionate about clean code, good documentation, and open source.

Extensively experienced with:
Go, Erlang, Lua, Bash, PHP;
Nginx, Redis, Mongo, Cassandra/BigTable;
Ansible, ELK stack, CentOS/RHEL, Archlinux, GCE.

Moderately experienced with:
Ruby, Python, C, Javascript;
MySQL/MariaDB, Prometheus/Grafana, Chef;
Ubuntu/Debian, CoreOS, AWS, Kubernetes/Docker.

• Wrote a custom analytics platform in Go, using Google BigTable as backing store and Redis/Mongo as aggregation caches. Handled a global load of >27 million new rows an hour, with up-to-the-hour analytics for all customers.
• Implemented a custom, dc-aware service discovery system for our microservices based app, using Etcd & SkyDNS. Included health checking, metrics, rolling-restarts, and more.
• Designed Go-based framework for implementing microservices which automatically handled configuration, logging, health checks, metrics, RPC/service discovery, and more.
• Implemented an internal RFC process for new product features and maintained the internal technical documentation wiki.
• Contributed to designing and implementing the provisioning/deployment system using Ansible, and began work on migrating to Kubernetes.

• Wrote client-to-client communication server in Erlang (with Redis backend) which served as the backbone of the Broadcasts feature, where users host their own radio-like channels, complete with voting, real-time chat, and moderation.
• Designed and implemented Feeds feature using PHP and Mongo, where users could see the recent listening activites of their friends in a Facebook-like feed.
• Managed and fine-tuned LAMP stack, as well as oversaw migration from Apache to nginx/php-fpm. Maintained complex nginx setup, including use of the lua-scripting module on some domains.
• Wrote and maintained the deployment scripts for frontend code, and contributed significantly to the Chef-based provisioning system.
• Initiated and oversaw the migration of frontend devs from using a shared development server to individual Vagrant setups.

• Author of one of the recommended Redis drivers for Go, radix.v2, and its much improved sequel, radix.v3.
• Author of mediocre-go-lib, a Go framework used for personal projects and similar in style to the one written for Admiral.
• Main contributor to okq, a simple, fast, and scalable job server written in Go and backed by Redis. Used at both Grooveshark and Admiral for extremely high-throughput loads.
• Author of small art projects such as mediocregopher.com/viz and others featured at blog.mediocregopher.com, mostly written in Clojure.