Clients

Below are companies that Code 30 has consulted with or that Jonathan Swartz, principal engineer, has been employed with.

Hearst Corporation Hearst

In 2006 the Hearst Corporation retained Code 30 to design a software architecture for new online versions of their magazines (including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Harper's Bazaar) as well as associated content management, subscription management and ad rotation systems.

  • Designed and built a lightweight web application framework that combined best-of-breed Perl components for templating, database access, logging and testing. The framework, named "Poet", will be released to the open source community.
  • Created personal development environments in which each developer could work independently, and control their own servers, without interfering with each other.
  • Created a code deployment system allowing fine-grained deployment of resources from development to staging and production, with automated backup and one-step rollbacks.
  • Added an automated test framework and wrote a large number of initial tests. At time of writing Hearst has 155 test classes and a total of 6819 test cases. The full test suite is run hourly in all environments and the results are reported via email and internal web page.
  • Created a caching framework to manage the dozens of separate uses of caching throughout the code base. Different caches use local files, nfs files, or memcached as appropriate. In 2007 the caching framework, CHI, was released to the open source community where its development continues.

Amazon.com Amazon

In 2003 Amazon.com hired Jonathan to help lead a migration from an in-house templating system to Mason. By 2006, nearly all pages on Amazon.com and affiliated sites (including six international Amazon sites and retailers such as Target.com and NBA.com) were being generated with Mason.

  • Added significant performance improvements to Mason, as well as other features driven by Amazon's needs. Released all non-proprietary improvements to the open source community.
  • Led mentoring and documentation efforts for the hundreds of Mason web developers within the company.
  • Developed a service aggregation framework to aggregate the hundreds of service calls and calculations that contribute to an Amazon "product" (book, dvd, apparel, etc.). This gave web developers a simple unified API for displaying products of any type.
  • Created an internal product web service, with results cached in memcached, so that data for popular products could be retrieved quickly from any remote software component.

Brightmail, Inc. Brightmail

Brightmail was a leading anti-spam software company in San Francisco, CA. It was bought by Symantec in 2004.

  • Built web applications and back-end systems used by the Brightmail Logistical Operations Center, which sifted through millions of emails per day to generate anti-spam rules for Brightmail's customers.
  • Lead conversion from CGI to mod_perl/Mason.
  • Significantly improved performance of inbound email processing.
  • Researched and experimented with cutting edge spam-detection technologies.

AvantGo AvantGo

AvantGo was a mobile software company allowing users to sync internet content to their handheld devices. It was bought by Sybase in 2002.

  • Manager of a nine-person technology team responsible for AvantGo's web site, Internet sync service, and hand-held user interface.
  • Led development on the web side of the team, building web applications and infrastructure with mod_perl/Mason on FreeBSD Unix.
  • Implemented substantial improvements in the development environment, such as independent development areas and web servers for each engineer.

Moviestreet

Moviestreet was an e-commerce startup specializing in selling family-oriented videos and music. It was bought by Sega in 2001.

  • Converted site infrastructure from CGI/NetCommerce to mod_perl/Mason on Solaris.
  • Installed web-based content management system and added version control.
  • Engineered new site features, such as dynamically generated product pages and SWISH-based search page.
  • Implemented caching layer to improve efficiency.

CMP Media / Techweb TechWeb

Techweb was the internet division of CMP Media and an early pioneer of online technical content.

  • Built web site platform using Perl, Oracle, and Apache on a Solaris Unix platform.
  • Co-developed an ad server that delivered CMPnet's ads for over a year.
  • Developed Mason, a web site delivery system used to serve over a million impressions a day on over twenty CMPnet sites (e.g. TechWeb, Information Week).
  • Managed group of seven software engineers, who developed dynamic web sites and editorial interfaces using mod_perl, Mason, and Oracle.