Kostya Vasilyev's software blog

I am a software engineer who spent about 12 years working in Silicon Valley for such companies as Symantec, Apple, eBay and others.

Right now I am dabbling in Android, so far it’s a lot of fun. I presently reside in Russia (somewhere near Moscow).

My resume is below. If you would like to contract me for work, feel free to email at “kmansoft” “at-sign” “gmail”. The logistics are really simple since I am a US citizen.

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Technical skills

Twelve years of software experience. C++ and Windows programming since 1989. Macintosh (MPW, CodeWarrior) in 1992-1996, Java since 1996, realtime 3D in 1996-1998, Linux in a server environment in 1998-2002. Now dabbling in mobile device programming (Android).

Excellent debugging skills. Good at bringing pieces of the project together and making them fit. Can do difficult things and make them work.

Technologies

Languages and platforms: C++, C#, Windows, some Mac, Java including VM internals (but not the EJB stuff), JavaScript, x86 asm. Linux & FreeBSD in a server environment. SQL (some MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle on Linux). Networking. Google Android.

Libraries: MFC, .Net Windows Forms, STL,various open source libs (libjpeg, libz, etc.)

Tools: Visual C++/C#, Eclipse, gcc and other Unix build tools.

Markup: HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS.

Past work experience

2000-2002: eBay

Initially hired as a contractor to fix hard bugs.

Created an automated system for centralized logging and analysis of eBay web application behavior. The logging facility ran on production web servers with no performance hit, sending data to a custom server for centralized storage and processing.

The data was used for creating hourly and daily reports that included: web page / sql cross-references with performance data, exception events with execution trace, statistics on web page and sql timings.

Later the system was extended to include a real-time monitoring component that provided access to historical data at varying level of detail (like viewing a page response time graph in 5 second resolution from 16 hours ago).

The facility was used by the development to learn how the application works, track down difficult bugs, analyze performance; by system administrators to track down performance bottlenecks; by QA to gauge quality of new code rollouts.

The tools were written in C++ and hosted on a 6-machine cluster with 1,5 TB of storage, running Debian Linux with nfs/ext3 filesystem.

Later the client library was integrated into the next-generation eBay application platform written Java.

As a separate project, implemented a way for site administrators to block spammers based on their IP. Every page request on eBay’s site was subject to a check by this facility. There was no performance hit in production. The server component on a Sun box under Solaris.

1998-2000: Relevance, later Documentum

Contributed to a knowledge management (“intelligent content mining”) system, later acquired by Documentum. I wrote the document-acquisition subsystem, including a web crawler for downloading web pages, extracting relevant portions, and converting to an internal XML format. Java, SQL, XML.

Also wrote an internal tool that analyzed Java VM memory usage on Windows, to find a memory leak that could not be found over several months and was a show-stopper for shipping. The tool took a week to write and then one day to identity the leak.

In spare time, created a community video sharing site (several years before Youtube). Used Apple’s open source Darwin Streaming Server, hosted on Linux, with web site implemented using PHP and Oracle.

1996-1998: NewFire, a 3D startup, co-founder.

Our goal was to implement browser-based realtime 3D graphics competitive with the best games of the time (Quake, Unreal). We used just-then emerging VRML for the file format, our own 3D engine for rendering, included support for 3D hardware (just emerging at the time) as well as software rendering.

I architected and implemented most of the VRML engine, from parsing to in-memory data representation to the runtime (including scripting in Java), wrote the browser plugin and architected the scene assembly tool. Created plugin architecture for various renderers: software, Direct3D, OpenGL, Glide (a 3Dfx API), and most of the rendering plugins themselves except for the software renderer.

Also did a lot of work integrating pieces done by other engineers.

1995-1996: Apple

Software engineer (contract). Continued work on the cross platform C++ application framework (see Symantec below), now retargeted at simplifying development for OpenDoc (Apple’s answer to OLE).

1989-1995: Symantec

Started in 1989 in QA (first job in the US).

Since 1990, a software engineer in the Core Technologies group, contributing to a cross-platform (Win/Mac) C++ application framework, later the project was joined by Apple.

Symantec pulled out of the project in January 1994, with Apple continuing.

I stayed at Symantec for another year in the Development Tools group, and wrote a visual UI editing tool for Symantec’s Windows C++ development environment using C++/MFC.

Personal

Unfinished MS in Comp.Sci. / Math (University of Moscow, Soviet Union), interrupted in 1989 due to emigration to the US.

US citizen.

Since 2002 living in Russia.

References

Available upon request.