Have worked on lots of different projects: Desktop, embedded, gaming systems, cloud backends, and browser front-ends.

Have written hundreds of thousands of lines of C code over the years and know all the ins and outs.  Having written systems that use a fixed amount of memory, run in the kernel, and therefore can never suffer from memory leaks.

Master of the Perl one-liner; I use Perl like it's an extension of the Linux command line. And often write Perl scripts on-the-fly to quickly analyze bigger chunks of data.

Have worked for some years in a full-on extreme programming environment with pair programming, mandatory code reviews, and fully automated TDD with 100% code coverage.

Have experience in some interesting lesser known areas of Linux, e.g. FUSE file system, /dev/shm, network stack tuning, and shared memory API.

Have worked directly on the code bases for 3 different systems with production traffic of multi-billion requests per day. Biggest had 50 billion production requests per day and was engineered to handle up to 500 billion in case of monster spikes.

Have an open source project on github and know a little about the differences in licensing.

For better or worse, I seem to find myself still having to deal with Apache. As such I have learned a lot about how to get the best performance out of it.

Have in depth knowledge and experience debugging protocols such as UDP, TCP, DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, and tools such as tcpdump.

In my latest job it's all about making PHP run faster to reduce the number of servers necessary. I've already paid for my salary several times over by making changes which have significantly reduced the number of servers necessary to run the PHP scripts.

Have lots of experience architecting and coding server side daemons and collections of them.

Personal details

Simon H.

Summary

Technical skills