Paul Banks

[ Software Engineer ]

Curriculum Vitae

I'm a Software Engineer. I live in Devon, UK, working remotely for DeviantArt. I started my career as a full-stack web developer and have experience with native mobile development but I'm increasingly drawn to distributed systems problems and scalable architecture design. If you know of opportunities to work in that space, especially any supporting remote work, I'd love to hear from you.

Experience

June 2013 — Present Principal Engineer (Infrastructure) at DeviantArt

June 2011 — June 2013 Senior Developer at DeviantArt

September 2010 — June 2011 Web Developer at DeviantArt

DeviantArt is the world's largest online art community with over 30 million registered users.

For the last two years I've been leading our Infrastructure team. Before that I worked on a variety of projects for the web team.

Projects I've worked on or responsibilities I've held at DeviantArt include:

• Leading development of new product features like our primary browse/search interface and More Like This recommendations
• Security audits -- including re-writing our user authentication system
• Database cluster migration
• Writing a new Database access layer to encapsulate complex operations on sharded clusters
• Implementing multivariate testing methodology to measure and maximise ad revenue and conversion
• Designing new frameworks and processes to scale complex new features and keep our growing development team agile
• Building and reviewing C++ back-end systems for search and machine learning/recommendation products
• Consulting on architecture and distributed systems design as well as reviewing other team's designs for scalability, reliability or performance issues
• On hiring team for several positions including web and C++ engineers

September 2008 — September 2010 Web Developer at ents24.com

Ents24 is an entertainment listings website with over 1 million unique visitors per month. It was the third largest online ticket retailer in the UK during my employment there [Hitwise 2009].

I worked mostly on the website as one of two developers, but also single-handedly developed a native iOS app which received over 10,000 downloads just within the UK.

September 2004 — September 2008 Freelance Web Developer

Before and during my University studies I completed many web development projects for a variety of clients.

I remain registered as self-employed, and continue to provide hosting and maintenance services for new and previous clients.

Ongoing Open Source

I have much less spare time to work on Open Source projects since having a family, but in the line of work I've created a few small tools and contributed minor fixes to others. Sample of these can be seen below:

• Go daemon that consumes from Kafka and relays to Scribe to aid in migration between legacy Scribe based logging collector and Kafka
• C++ Kafka Producer client for cases where specific batch error handling guarantees are needed
• Rust Documentation
• CockroachDB build system
• Python MySQL Replication
• Handlebars.js Documentation
• Some years ago I contributed to/wrote several modules for the Kohana Framework. I gave a presentation on a module I was working on and the topic of ORM generally at London Kohana Conference (May 2010).

Contact

Please email me at banks[at]banksco[dot]de if you want any further informaion.