Dan Linder
dan@abstractimplements.com
Camas, WA + Remote
Adroit software developer and engineering leader seeks position at early- to mid-stage startup with significant backend challenges in the billing, video, or API spaces.
Experience
The Long Now Foundation
IT Director (2024 - Present)
Technical Lead (2015 - 2024)
- Key technologist at one of the Bay Area’s best-loved nonprofits, owning our Django-based membership system and website; maintaining Long Bets : The Arena for Accountable Predictions, overseeing a payments environment spanning membership, gifts, and the critically-acclaimed The Interval Bar & Cafe.
- Very tangentially involved in landing a language archive on a comet and crashing another into the Moon.
- Enabled 360° view of donor activity by building a replication fabric synchronizing HubSpot CRM, Stripe, and bespoke Django membership system via asynchronous APIs and webhooks.
- Minimized churn while transitioning payment providers by orchestrating secure porting of payment card data from legacy provider to Stripe.
- Avoided costly rewrite by extracting business logic to REST API endpoints, facilitating move to React-based frontend.
- Migrated legacy Elastic Transcoder based video pipeline to YouTube, including all existing content, greatly broadening our audience.
- Python, Django, Django REST Framework, Celery, SQS, React, Ghost, Sentry
StyleSeat, Inc.
Senior Software Engineer (2011 - 2015)
- First engineering hire at the startup that would become the premiere platform for independent beauty professionals to run and grow their businesses. Outsized impact on code, culture, and hiring.
- Seed-stage startup generalist: frontend, backend, ops.
- Built client payment card processing, service provider ACH payouts, and mobile API, including several payment gateway transitions.
- Involved in debugging and optimizing every aspect of the early product, including calendaring/scheduling, search, UI, etc.
- Increased customer revenue by leading a small team in creating an Uber-style payments experience, including automatic charging and SMS/app-based tipping.
- Proposed and implemented “Fancy Friday”, a “Casual Friday” inversion ideal for a beauty & wellness tech startup, as well as a whisk(e)y appreciation club.
- Python, Django, Solr, Lucene, MySQL, AWS, EC2, RDS, AngularJS, Sentry, New Relic
Current TV
Manager, Backend Software Engineering (2008 - 2011)
Lead Backend Software Engineer (2007 - 2008)
- I joined Current’s skunkworks social news project and rapidly rose to managing the backend web software group. Along the way I pitched Al Gore, worked with Will Wright, and generally helped democratize television, briefly materializing the mythical ``Two Screen Experience’'.
- Managed a team of five backend software engineers.
- Built a web crawler, parser, and extractor to pull videos, images, audio, and text content for social news site articles.
- Implemented site search, including query analyzer, stemming, faceted searches, ranking, and discoverability.
- Enabled cross-team collaboration with otherwise-unlikely partners through re-architecting Current’s backend as an easily-consumable REST web service.
- Achieved zero-downtime releases via API backwards-compatibility and database replica coordination.
- Encouraged “hack-day” participation by including junior developers in a well-received experiment in extracting closed-captions from the broadcast signal and displaying relevant site content.
- Working with Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club, led the creation of the StoryMaker API for the audience-written TV series Bar Karma.
- Java, Spring, REST, MySQL, Lucene, ffmpeg, On2 Flix, Scala
Abstract Implements, LLC
Principal
- Designed dashboards and kiosk displays, defined maintenance tasks on a custom time-series database, and improved performance through JVM tuning and GC selection for a solar monitoring and control platform. [AngularJS, Java]
- Built award-winning MVP web app for a mesh-networked data platform that monitors coin-op games, including dashboards, email / SMS alerting, and the API called by the embedded hardware. [Python, Django, PostgreSQL]
Awards
- Amusement & Music Operators Association Innovator Award, 2012
- Emmy, Interactive Television, Current TV, 2007
- Webby, Best Practices, Current TV, 2007
- Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, University of Illinois, Multiple Awards
Education
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL
Master of Computer Science
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science; Honors