Dave Rolsky

At Thomson Reuters, I have worked on integrating new data feeds with an existing database of corporate information. Much of this work involved talking to the business side of the company, as well as the outside feed partner, and making sure that the solution I was building would satisfy our business requirements.

I have also worked on a number of infrastructure projects. I worked on adding support for new processor architectures to our build system, building a mechanism for managing our Perl module installations, and adding support for handling Unicode data to our code base. This work required coordination with developers in different groups, as well as gaining an understanding of business requirements for internationalization.

At LiveText, I worked on a variety of projects. One project involved adding automatic draft saving to the FCK editor that was used to create documents in the system. As users edited, work was regularly saved to the server using Ajax. If a document was not saved "properly" by the user, perhaps because of a browser crash, they did not lose their work.

I also helped improve internal practices by implementing automated unit and integration testing. I set up a continuous test server that checked out branches of the code, ran the tests, and reported the results to a Smolder instance.

As part of a growing startup, I worked on numerous projects at Socialtext. I created our first automated deployment system, as well as our first automated tests. I also performed on-site field engineering for a major customer, integrating our appliance into their custom SSL certificate authentication system.

One of the larger projects I worked on was moving some of our data storage from the file system to a Postgres database, providing data integrity, increased query-ability, and much improved speed of data retrieval. Along the way, I also implemented a simple but flexible ACL system, and added real authorization checks, plugging numerous security holes.

One of my first consulting jobs was with Marigold Technologies, working on their salesperson-focused CRM, ContactBook. I was initially hired to do code review of the existing system. After this was completed, I helped them re-architect the code for greater scalability and added a number of features. Along the way, I mentored another developer on the new system architecture.

The most challenging of these new features was adding per-client custom fields for contacts. The end result was a customizable system for end users which maintained strong data integrity constraints and allowed for quick searches over large sets of contacts.

I've also worked for Kineticode on deploying the Bricolage CMS for several Kineticode customers.

Later, I worked on a simple mini-CMS for Native Americans in Philanthropy. This CMS allowed them to control the dynamic portions of their web site, such as job listings and news. It is also integrated with a membership management CRM I wrote, allowing new members to sign up and pay online.

I was responsible for the design and development of an online system "donation shopping" system. Non-profit organizations were able to enter data about themselves, and this data was browseable by potential donors, who could donate directly to the non-profits.

Clients were provided co-branded access to the system, and had an administrative interface from which they could view statistics, filter non-profits shown on their version of the site, and select featured projects for their site.

In addition, I also created a development environment which allowed both the designers (using Macs) and developers (using either Windows or GNU/Linux) to share a CVS repository and to run their own copy of the site.

I was involved in the design and implementation of a Unix version of O'Reilly's WebBoard, which had begun life as a VB web application for Windows.