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Brian Picciano

Senior Systems and Backend Programmer

University of Florida 2013 · BS Software Engineering · Mathematics Minor

10+ years of experience across backend systems, databases, and application development. Passionate about clean interfaces, good documentation, and open source.

Extensively experienced with:
Go, Javascript-HTML-CSS, Nix, Bash, Lua, Clojure, Erlang;
Redis, Postgres/MariaDB, Cassandra/Scylla, Mongo;
Nginx, Caddy, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK stack, Ansible, GCE;
Many flavors of Linux; Docker.

5+ years of experience working remotely as a developer. Well-versed in communicating over slack, zoom, and email, and in maintaining good working relationships across large timezone differences.

I also have past experience with many other languages and tools which I could easily pick back up.

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 much of my public work. Most of it is throw-away projects, but listed here are a few which are actively developed and much loved.

I frequently document the progress of my various projects on my blog.

  • Author of one of the recommended Redis drivers for Go, radix.
  • Author of one of dehub, a git project hosting platform baked into the project's commit history itself. It's not much used, even by me, but it's functional and I'm proud of it.
  • Working on an unreleased project, where we are creating the foundation for community-run cloud infrastructures.
  • Long-term work on a toy (so far) programming language. You can follow the progress of the language at blog.mediocregopher.com.
  • Author of small art projects such as viz and others featured at blog.mediocregopher.com, mostly written in Clojure.
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