Last updated: Jan 2019

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Brian Picciano

Senior Systems and Backend Programmer
University of Florida 2013 · BS Software Engineering · Mathematics Minor

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.

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

Admiral

May 2015 - January 2018
Co-Founder
Senior Backend Developer

getadmiral.com is a platform to help publishers analyze and recover revenue being lost due to adblocking users.

  • 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.

Grooveshark

Senior Systems Engineer (from intern)
2010 - Apr 2015

Grooveshark was a web-based music streaming site in the same vein as Spotify.

  • 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.

Open-Source/Personal Projects

github.com/mediocregopher contains all public work. Most of it is throw-away projects, but listed here are a few which are actively developed and much loved.

  • 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 viz and others featured at blog.mediocregopher.com, mostly written in Clojure.

Outside of work

  • Rock climber and backpacker.
  • Organizer of the Dumbathon, an annual hackathon of sorts.
  • Competitive Super Smash Bros. Player.
  • Attained 100% completion of Super Meat Boy video game.