Adam Kangas

http://www.adamkangas.com

Lead back-end developer on Snap Shots, a product which shows rich previews of a website’s outbound hyperlinks to users on mouseover. Back-end developer on Snap LinkAds, a product providing procedurally generated contextual ads. Through machine learning, the system converges towards showing ads that work while abandoning those that fail. Scaled the Snap Network to support installation on millions of websites, including major blogging networks (e.g. LiveJournal, Wordpress.com), servicing thousands of requests per second. Wrote custom database software, web servers, load-balancing proxies, and message queue systems to maximize throughput and redundancy while minimizing latency across hundreds of colocated Linux servers. Core in-house technologies worked on: - Custom key-value database for efficient, compact storage, querying and transmission of all in-house data. All data stored compactly in a custom binary format. Individual databases may be partitioning over any number of servers, to ensure redundancy and fast data access. [language: C | relevant libraries: glib] - Custom high performance web application server. Given a YAML or XML configuration, incoming HTTP requests are handled by making parallel requests to data sources such as databases, external partner APIs, RSS feeds fetched in realtime, etc. [C/glib] - Custom load-balancing, fault-resistant proxies to sit between frontend and backend services. [C/glib] - Custom message queue system to manage data flow despite rapidly evolving lists of publishers and subscribers. [C/glib] - High-performance HTML/XML scraping system, utilizing multiple cores/processors as available. [C, Ruby] - Ruby Gems to provide access to in-house C libraries for utility scripts and Ruby on Rails applications [C, Ruby]