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Philippe M. Chiasson







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Summary

  From the wire, up

I like to build highly scalable, available, maintainable and high performance systems and products, by building on open source infrastructure components.

In addition, I have over 25 years of open source development experience as a contributor and project lead, in particular within the Apache, Perl and mod_perl projects.

I am always looking for interesting challenges that would allow me to use my expertise to it's full while at the same time teaching me something I didn't know yet.

I have a strong team spirit, and I enjoy working in a friendly, family-like environment.



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Expertise

As a designer of large systems, it's important to recognize the right tool for the right job. As a side-effect, I have grown a large tool set that I can reach into when it's time to solve problems.

At a high level, here are some of the major elements of my expertise:



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Professional experience



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Mozilla, Remote



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Cloud Specialist (2014-present)

When the Mozilla Lab was cloded down, I moved into a new role within the traditional and aging IT group. I was part of a small SWAT team with the mission of taking all of Mozilla's operations to the Cloud.

In this role, I've helped understand the existing challenges of a data-center centric operation organization, with a lot of baggage. I was instrumental in designing what eventually became a full-featured cloud platform called Nubis to embody in code all the best patterns and practices of Cloud Operations.

With the work on that platform, I was able to be instrumental in the successful migration to the cloud of a large portion of Mozilla's IT workload, all using a single methodology, bringing order and repeatablilty to what was once cahos.

It's in this role that I was able to develop a very deep understanding of the challenges of moving to the Cloud. From financial aspects all the way to deep technical limitations of the different Cloud platforms.



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Director of Mozilla Lab (2011-2014)

When Mozilla Messaging was folded back into Mozilla, it moved into Mozilla's R&D Lab. I became the sole operator of the entirety of the Lab.

This included moving back Thunderbird services into the Mozilla Lab infrastructure, but also meant providing support, operationnal services and architecture services to the large number of projects incubating in the Lab.

In my role, I served as an advisory to most projects, helping them reach their goals and ultimately, leave the incubator.

I operated a large heteregonus operational workload, mentored many young projects with little real-life operational experience, reviewd architectural design and provided day to day support for all the ongoing projects.



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Mozilla Messaging, Remote



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System Architect (2008-2011)

I oversaw the entire buildout from scratch of the entire IT operating stack for Mozilla Messaging, a spinoff of Mozilla, taking on all responsability for the development, support and release of Thunderbird, Mozilla's e-mail client.

I reported directly to the CEO and was responsible for:



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ActiveSate, Vancouver, Canada



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Director of Webops/IT (2006-2008)

I have overall responsibility for the team responsible for all production websites, internal IT systems, engineering and staff IT support, telecom, and operations support. Reporting to the CEO, I have:



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Senior Perl Developer (2005-2006)

As Senior Perl Developer, I was responsible for the design, development and support of ActivePerl, The Perl DevKit (PDK) and other perl related products.

I was responsible for successfully porting ActivePerl and The Perl DevKit (PDK) to OS X and it's newer universal binary format.

I ran and maintained the infrastructure behind ppm.activestate.com, a distribution mechanism for Perl modules. This system, in use by tens of thousands of developers worldwide, builds, tests, packages and distributes binary versions of 10,000 CPAN packages on a large number of operating systems. Challenges included porting open source projects to non-mainstream operating systems, coordination with enterprise customers, and upgrading a mission-critical infrastructure with no downtime.



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TicketMaster.com, Los Angeles, USA (2003-2005)

Senior Software Engineer

I was responsible for multiple projects involving the massive infrastructure behind www.ticketmaster.com

At ticketmaster, I have been involved in most aspects of the existing system: designing and writing custom Apache modules; profiling and performance analysis of the existing infrastructure; application design and implementation.



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eXtropia.com, Singapore, Singapore (2001-2003)

Senior System Engineer

I was responsible for system administration, design, deployment and troubleshooting.

My main task while at eXtropia was to provide customers and developers with the tools and support they needed to complete our projects. My work varied from network infrastructure design to specific software design and implementation. Performance, scalability, maintainability and robustness were of utmost importance.

I was instrumental in helping our customers in the Banking industry successfully design, implement and launch their first ever dynamic online presences.



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Opendesk Corporation, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (2000-2001)

Senior mod_perl Developer, Architect and Evangelist

Once OpenDesk became a full-featured product, HBE founded the OpenDesk Corporation to host all development related to that product.

In my existing role as SmartWorker Architect, I joined OpenDesk to continue the development of SmartWorker along with the growing core team. Being the core component used to build a large online service, it was critically important to successfully meet the various challenges encountered by the OpenDesk team.

In that role, I lead the development of many new features, improved the performance the system as well as increased the overall quality of the framework.

At the same time, I was responsible for guiding an effort to turn SmartWorker into a successfully Open Source project, with a community of contributors.



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HBE Software, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (1999-2000)

Senior mod_perl Developer and Architect

I joined HBE with my mod_perl expertise to help them complete the SmartWorker project. Initially as a core developer of the platform, I made significant contribution towards the first, production-ready, release of SmartWorker.

Later, I took on the leadership of the core team, responsible for all SmartWorker development. I was responsible for new feature development, quality and code review, as well as architectural decisions. The successfully development of SmartWorker was the key technology that enabled HBE to produce OpenDesk.com



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Professional Achievements



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Speaking

I have given public presentations both to internal groups, as well as at conferences. I enjoy helping others reach new levels of understanding.

Recent presentations include ApacheCon 2007 US, ApacheCon 2006 EU and WebGUI 2005 NL.

The full list of my archived talks is available online

http://gozer.ectoplasm.org/talks



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Education



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Last Modified

$Date: 2006-03-08 05:01:58 $



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Revision

$Id: resume.pod,v 1.16 2006-03-08 05:01:58 gozer Exp $



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Author

Philippe M. Chiasson <gozer@ectoplasm.org>






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