Alan Bailward

Web Developer At Left Of The Dot

admin — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:00:13 +0000

April 2011 I took employment with a startup company called Left of the Dot as a web developer and sysadmin. As a small startup they were requiring someone who not only was able to deal with the fast paced life of a developer, but also maintain and build the networking and technology infrastructure of a growing company. I’m working for the first time as a PHP developer and learning the Yii MVC framework.

So far this position has provided a fast paced, friendly environment of not only the sheer terror of working at a startup, but the pure joy of working at a startup.

A Return To Programming and Management

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:12:51 +0000

In July of 2009 I became employed by airG Mobile, a leader in cell phone based social networking. I was employed to be a “Launch Manager” and developer. I started concentrating on Launch Management, which really means coordinating a bunch of teams to get everything ready for a weekly code launch to the servers, followed by restarting the server farm. Not a big deal you might think, but if (and when) things go wrong, they knew they needed someone with some sysadmin as well as programmer skills.

I’ve since trained a team of 5 other people to be Launch Managers and have them rotating week by week, so I can concentrate on doing development work. At airG I work in the Integrations department, configuring our software for various client projects, working within our home built Perl framework and configuration tools. I’ve also had work with the symfony PHP framework and a wide variety of “sysadmin” like work involved in the day to day running of the Integrations team.

The OS Development Era

admin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 05:21:15 +0000

I was extremely challenged by the work at Layer 7 Technologies as their OS Developer. I bridged the Developers and QA techs in defining and maintaining the server based embedded networking appliance operating system. My biggest accomplishment was to drastically decrease the build time for building system images. I took a “by-hand”, very prone to human error system and turned it into almost a completely automated system based on Kickstart and a variety of scripts and utilities.

I ensured that the OS was STIG (US Military secure specification) compliant and developed an SELinux enabled build of the system. I was also responsible for the development ESX server versions of the software. Because of my past sysadmin experience, I was pulled into maintaining the development servers and company network services.

The Sysadmin Era

admin — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 05:09:04 +0000

I had always wanted to work as a sysadmin, and know the joy of having tens or hundreds of computers at my beckon call to bend to my will. Eventually I got my wish. I was hired on to a small ISP and Manged Service provider which was bought about a year later by Uniserve Corporation, one of the mid-sized ISPs in Vancouver. I was responsible for anywhere from 30 to 50 Linux, BSD, Solaris, and windows servers.

The systems team I was a part of was in charge of dealing with spam filtering, maintaining the IBM blade server and SAN which housed the mail cluster, doing break-fix work and supporting the other teams. In this time I dealt with client communications, server room maintenance design and setup, and learned the intricacies of working in a 24/7/365 environment. I also stretched my web design skills and helped design and develop a client management and bandwidth tracking system for one of the major movie studios in Vancouver. This is akin to the “you must log in to surf the net” systems that hotels and airports have.

The Web Developer Era

admin — Fri, 19 Jul 2002 04:54:13 +0000

After the dot com bust I got into the web application development world. This involved my own contracting company working in tandem with web developers. “They make it pretty, I make it work” was how I described what I did. I worked on everything from a web based insurance underwriting system to educational website games and utilities to fully functional Content Management Systems. These systems were designed under the LAMP stack with pure mod_perl, EmbPerl, HTML::Mason and a variety of other Perl based systems. Other projects include

A generic and full featured CMS written to be re-used and customized. It also includes a contact management system, mailing list engine, and templating language.
A real estate system allowing propery uploading via secure login and searching and display to the public. This also had many of the contact and mailing list features.
A website builder called Rubber Toaster, which is basically a one-step-removed Content Management Sytem. It allows users to create content for websites, apply the skin (this is the “make it pretty” part), design the pages, images, and web galleries, and then download it for use. It was also a full e-commerce system, allowing purchase online by credit card.

The Dot Com Era

admin — Tue, 19 Sep 2000 04:17:49 +0000

Time moved along and the dot com era happened, Netmaster was renamed to Merilus, and I took position as Senior Developer. Merilus were the creators of (among other things) the FireCard, the first PC on a PCI card. The embedded nature of the Firecard required me to take position as the lead C programmer. In this position I created many of the utilities that were used for system monitoring and data transfer between the Java based client and the card. I also led a small team of programmers with skills in Java, Perl and C.

The nature of the programming with that was done involved a lot of fast moving, agile team work. I worked closely with the front end Java team and architected many high performance utilities. Amongst my programming accomplishments are

An encrypted data transfer system for client/server communications
A unique DHCP-like system that allowed the Java client to find the headless Firecard on the local network with a variety of failovers to ensure that the system would never be “lost” on the network.

The Programmer Era

admin — Sun, 19 Apr 1998 04:17:28 +0000

I think almost everyone in the technology industry of a certain age has a dot com story. Mine starts with a little company called Netmaster Networking. I was employed as a junior programmer creating perl code for the system and the web based administration for the NICS system, a firewall and network router system. This is where I got my foundation in web applications, and working with a small team to create fast and agile code. We also dealt with security, network design, firewalls and VPNs.

The Tech Support Era

admin — Sat, 24 Sep 1994 03:06:40 +0000

My foray into the technical work world was a four year tenure as technical support and system administration for the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board. In this time I was responsible for helping transition to a new and more modern dial up system as technical support. This involved a lot of user education, patience, and delving deep into the bowels of system configuration. In this time I learned the art of troubleshooting and client communications.

Additionally, after I moved into the position of system administration I was responsible for the monthly creation of the Real Estate catalog. This was a do-or-die situation, and had to be done right every week, rain or shine. I also improved the efficiency of image processing and data collection for the Real Estate Board’s web based initiative as REALTORs were allowed to submit their own images and data.