Burke Webster

burke.webster@gmail.com
burkewebster.com

Objective

Striving to master the art of creating simple, usable products that solve real-world problems.

Striving to master the art of creating
simple, usable products that
solve real-world problems.

Experience

Kapost
2015 - current

Leading our backend engineering teams as we peal off micro-services and build fast and scalable APIs. Always looking for small tweaks to increase efficiency and predictability of our teams.

Helped rebuild our analytics systems into a fault-tolerant, SQS-powered beast that processes hundreds of thousands of jobs on a daily basis.

Led the development of a fast and scalable full-text search service that makes all of your Kapost content (including all kinds of attachments) fully searchable.

Boulder, CO

Collective IP
2012 - 2015

Working on a data platform to help business development teams find new and emerging technology in a fast and efficient way.

Lots of experimenting with machine learning, natural language processing, search and scaling in the cloud.

Created a clean and responsive React/Flux interface that helped make sense of millions of data-points.

Denver, CO

Rally Software
2008 - 2012

Started as an engineer working on the core product. Moved up to development manager where I split my time between scaling the team and working on features.

Learned loads about agile, scrum, kanban and how to run an engineering organization.

Boulder, CO

Sandia National Labs
2003 - 2008

From intern to full-time position, worked on a small team focused on standing up 24hr network and infrastructure monitoring platform.

Transformed a continuous stream of network and systems monitoring events into actionable alerts to our network operations staff.

Albuquerque, NM



Education

Colorado State University
2006-2008

University of New Mexico
1999-2003

Bachelors of Science in Computer Science

Focus on math & math theory

Skills

Proficiencies (more details)

Java
Spring, Persistence, Webservices, JSON, Annotations, TestNG/JUnit
Ruby
Rails, Heroku
JavaScript
Douglas Crockford, Prototypical objects, JQuery, React
Scala
HTML/CSS
Bootstrap, SASS, LESS
SQL
INNER JOIN and GROUP BY with the best of 'em
Git
MapReduce
Information Retrieval
Lucene, ElasticSearch, Solr, SolrCloud
Crawl
Nutch
Machine Learning
Mahout, OpenNLP, Spark/MLlib
Payment Processing / Billing
CC Processing, Recurring Billing & Invoicing

Infrastructure (more details)

Heroku
AWS
EC2, S3, SQS, SNS, Glacier
Jetty / Tomcat
Spark
Databases
Oracle / PostgreSQL / MySQL / MongoDB
Cloudera

Processes (more details)

Continuous Integration
Jenkins, Nexus, Continuous Deployment
Agile
Scrum, Kanban, Lean
Continuous Improvement
We should always be working to better ourselves

Download resume

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

My (Mostly Professional) History in Lines

  • Grew up in New Mexico
  • Bachelors in Comp Sci from University of New Mexico
  • Worked at Sandia National Laboratories
  • Developed some wicked network monitoring infrastructure for the labs
  • Moved to Colorado (finally!)
  • Colorado State University + Masters in Comp Sci + full-time at Sandia = lots of late nights
  • Broke my collar bone snowboarding
  • Joined Rally Software
  • Learned lots and lots about Java & Spring, HTML, CSS & JavaScript
  • Played lots of foosball
  • Git, Nexus, Jenkins & Continuous Deployment became my friends
  • Became a Development Manager at Rally to help grow & manage the team
  • Broke my ankle playing hockey
  • Switched from Scrum to Kanban (for those that speak Japanese - 看板)
  • Met my beautiful, soon-to-be wife Stephanie
  • Learned more about Java
  • Joined Collective IP
  • Had surgery to repair a jacked up collarbone (see above)
  • Wrote my first MapReduce job
  • Started to index 10s of millions of docs into Solr
  • Deployed lots of infrastructure onto EC2 and Heroku
  • Tore up my other shoulder. Do you see a pattern?
  • Learned how (sometimes) awesome Nutch and crawling infrastructure can be
  • Started writing lots of features in Ruby on Rails
  • Married my beautiful wife Stephanie
  • Learned the ins and outs of accepting Payments and doing enterprise Subscription Billing
  • Began applying Machine Learning techniques to our data with Mahout
  • Discovered I love a good old fashioned. A lot
  • Got tired of waiting for slow jobs, started spinning up Spark, Scala & MLlib infrastructure
  • Transitioned our front-end infrastructure to React and Flux. Where was this all my life?
  • Joined Kapost to help lead the analytics team
  • Stood up a sweet full-text search service
  • Helped rebuild the Kapost analytics system into a highly scalable, fault-tollerant SQS-powered beast
  • Moved to Des Moines, IA to be closer to family. Helping define remote work for Kapost
  • Became Director of Backend Engineering to help scale our team, manage our amazing talent, and ensure we are operating as smooth as possible