JEFF BOULTER

To apply my 10+ years of experience building websites in conceiving, architecting, building and managing innovative, large-scale web applications connecting communities with personalized content.

Led Yahoo! News through a complete redesign that tripled revenue and dramatically increased unique users to make Yahoo! News the most popular News site in the world, 10 million unique users greater than competitors such as MSNBC and CNN. Handled 10x spikes in traffic during significant news events such as the Iraq war. Rebuilt existing infrastructure with modern technologies and design patterns.

Built, from scratch, a strong engineering team for Yahoo! Tech, the first new Media property at Yahoo! in 5 years. The site was launched in 5 months and extensively used AJAX, CSS, accessible HTML, semantic markup, and web services.

Other significant product deliveries include Yahooligans! Music, Animals, E-cards, Movies, News Slideshows, Astrology, Yahoo! Education Redesign (2003), Courses and Degrees.

Built a web-based tool to manage Agile process and projects which became the standard used by dozens of teams across the company, increasing efficiency and visibility.

Promoted the use of RSS within Yahoo! News and created the first feeds in 2003, becoming a recognized leader within the company for RSS and blogging. RSS feeds now account for a significant percentage of incoming News traffic.

Led a team to build a company-wide content store of news data based on NewsML, MySQL, perl and REST. The system was designed to efficiently and reliably process, normalize, index and distribute thousands of news articles to dozens of Yahoo! properties daily.

Converged and strengthened property monitoring systems to Nagios, providing visibility into site issues and performance. Built a system to report on feed publishing time from content partners to live web servers.

Recognized the need for dedicated operations engineers within the Yahoo! Media Group, hiring the first of a growing team and increasing developer productivity. Offshored non-core development projects.

Promoted MySQL use, building a shared, replicated cluster of geographically disparate machines from spare hardware. Offered the service to other Yahoo! Media properties as a simpler way to build data-driven sites. This system now serves millions of transactions per day for critical media sites.

Side projects: Built an knowledge base, book lending library application, blogging tool, and various utilities for managing MySQL databases.

ENGINEERING MANAGER, Yahoo! Music (formerly LAUNCH.com): April 1999 - June 2002
Conceived, architected, and built LAUNCHcast, LAUNCH's revolutionary personalized and community-driven streaming radio product, scalable to mass audiences. Rebuilt LAUNCH's on-demand streaming video application, optimizing for scalability, programmability and expandability.

Managed the daily activities of teams comprised of up to ten engineers. Created estimates and time lines, and monitored the progress of multiple simultaneous projects. Built a project management/task management/bug tracking web site which is now used throughout the organization by technical and non-technical personnel. Implemented development processes such as peer reviews, QA and requirements standardization.

ENGINEER, Microsoft: April 1998 - April 1999
Developed software in ASP, C++, and built an InstallShield installer for the first implementation of Microsoft's Passport authentication system.

ENGINEER, Firefly Network, Inc. (formerly Agents, Inc.): June 1996 - April 1998
Exercised my knowledge of web development environments in various individual and collaborative projects. Worked first-hand with clients such as BarnesandNoble.com and CollegeBeat to integrate Firefly software into their existing web sites. Managed the project that brought the first customer live onto Firefly's registration and profile exchange network. Wrote the server-side scripting component of Firefly's web site personalization product in JavaScript and VBScript on Solaris/Netscape and NT/IIS platforms.

INDEPENDENT CONSULTANT: 1996 - Present
Performed custom web development work after-hours for clients ranging from a large data warehouse to small clothing retailer.

ENGINEER, The Main Quad, Inc.: Summer 1995
Third member of a startup company which created a web site for college students. Installed and maintained a full computer network of Linux and Macintosh computers. Built database interfaces and web applications using HTML and Perl.

FOUNDER, CRAYON: CReAte Your Own Newspaper: April 1995 - 2002
Created the web's first personalized news aggregator which allows hundreds of thousands of registered users to create a free, customized newspaper, organizing hundreds of news sources from around the web.

2006 recipient of the Yahoo! Superstar award. The award is Yahoo!'s highest honor and is given to less than a dozen individuals each year.

WO/2001/035667 INTERNET RADIO AND BROADCAST METHOD
7,454,509 ONLINE PLAYBACK SYSTEM WITH COMMUNITY BIAS

APPLICATIONS: MySQL, Apache, Vignette StoryServer, SQL Server, CVS, Oracle, Nagios, IIS, CVS, InstallShield

OPERATING SYSTEMS: FreeBSD, Linux, Windows NT/2000/XP, MacOS X, Solaris

Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 1996
Major: Computer Science and Engineering (BSCSE)

BLOGGER boulter.com, 2003 - Present
Exercised my creative writing skills by sharing daily entries about technology and life.

Geocaching, web programming, gadgets. Built various popular geocaching tools. Created other applications in my spare time such as an Anagram Solver, Package Alert service and tools for Scrabble players.