Resumé

Experience

• IsoHunt Web Technologies Inc. Lead Developer, Master Coder & Toolsmith. January 2006 - present. Developed and deployed Internet software including next-gen targeted search engines and portals. Heavy focus in state-of-the-art text indexing and Web 2.0 systems complete stack scaling. Deployments spread over multiple datacentres with ownership extending from the hardware/kernel up to language optimizations and a special focus on MySQL. Managed codebases & teams working in PHP, Ruby on Rails and Perl. Also provided specialized Gentoo system administation knowledge.
• Gentoo Linux. Senior Developer, System Administrator. March 2003 - present. Responsible for development of base-system/openrc (focus on oldnet); packaging of MySQL, OpenLDAP & numerous other applications (formerly also PHP, Courier-IMAP & Qmail).
• Gentoo Linux. System Administrator: 2004 - present. Infrastructure Lead: 2007 - present. Administration of the numerous servers as well as CVS, SVN, Git, LDAP & Bugzilla et al. services for the distribution.
• BC Libraries Cooperative/SITKA. System Administrator. January 2012 - present. Revamping software deployment, managed hardware refresh, and provide ongoing support and maintenance for the open-source Evergreen ILS system (based on Perl & PostgreSQL).
• MogileFS. 2007 - present. Developed and actively maintain the PostGreSQL backend for the MogileFS distributed filesystem.
• BC Libraries Cooperative/SITKA. Consultant System Administrator & Architect. March 2011 - December 2011. Revamping software deployment, managed hardware refresh, and provide ongoing support and maintenance for the open-source Evergreen ILS system (based on Perl & PostgreSQL).
• Gentoo Foundation. Elected trustee of the non-profit Gentoo Foundation, 2009-2011, & 2011-2013 terms. Responsible for financial and business decisions for the distribution.
• Gentoo Council. Elected member of the Gentoo Linux Council, 2006-2007 term. Responsible for major technical decisions in the distribution.
• Global NetOptex, Inc. Consultant: Gentoo & MySQL. 2006 - 2010. Providing consulting services for Gentoo and MySQL deployments, with an emphasis on design, scaling and optimization.
• Merkle; The Gallery Group; (end client Capital One Bank). Consultant: Gentoo, MySQL, iSCSI, OpenLDAP. Feburary 2006 & March 2007. Providing consulting services for integration of Gentoo, iSCSI, MySQL & OpenLDAP, with an emphasis on design, scaling and optimization (work previously under NDA).
• Net-Conex Business Solutions Inc. Network Administrator. August 2005 - January 2006. Deployed and maintained large scale inter-building wireless backbone. Servicing 20+ buildings around Vancouver, using custom Linux routers (OSPF, iproute2, iptables). Deployment plan for VoIP utilizing wireless backbone.
• phpMyAdmin. Core Developer. May 2001 - May 2003, December 2003 - October 2005. Programming a major open source MySQL database management tool using PHP. Implemented the database maintenance controls, table & engine type code, host-based authentication, SQL parser & syntax-highlighter, SQL validator and many other bugfixes & improvements. Ongoing representation of phpMyAdmin at conferences: MySQL UC 2006-2011, OSCON 2006, LinuxTag Karlsruhe 2006.
• Orbis-Terrarum Networks. Owner, System Administrator & Web-page Designer. Summer 2001 - present. Run Linux server hosting DNS, WWW, Mail & more. Developed Web-pages using PHP & MySQL. Custom software development & system administration consulting services for a variety of open-source deployments.
• Simon Fraser University Surrey, Research Assistant positions:
  • (Gordon Pritchard). System Administrator. January 2004 - August 2005. Setup & system administration of the research labs, comprising 30+ servers & 90+ workstations of mixed platforms (Gentoo Linux, Fedora Linux, SUSE Linux, Windows, MacOS, IRIX). Custom software development to aid system administration tasks.
  • (Kay Wiese). Linux Cluster development. June 2005 - August 2005. Complete development of a Gentoo Linux based High-Performance Cluster (128 nodes), including some development on GLI (Gentoo Linux Installer).
  • (Vive Kumar). Software Developer. April 2004 - August 2004. Design & development of a PKI & security solution for the ePortfolio project.
  • (John Nesbit). Zope & Linux consultant. September 2003 - April 2004. Consulted on Gentoo Linux server deployment and administration including multi-instance Zope installs.
  • (Gordon Pritchard). System Administrator. June 2003 - September 2003. Setup & maintenance of the new research labs, comprising 20+ servers & 70+ workstations.
  • (Vive Kumar, Marek Hatala). Software Developer. May 2003 - June 2003. Systems design for a data collection agent producing SCORM packages.
  • (Steve DiPaola). Software Developer. Summer 2003. Maintenance of medium-sized MFC application. Ported PHP-based application using PostGreSQL to use MySQL instead.
  • (Gordon Pritchard). Software Developer. September 2002 - April 2003. Programmed a real-time asset tracking system (RATS) in PHP & MySQL, running on Linux.
  • (Julie Tolmie). Lead programmer. May 2002 - December 2002. Lead programmer on open source mathematics visualization tool for SGI IRIX (MVS).
• Technical University of British Columbia (Tom Calvert, Gordon Pritchard). Research Assistant (System Administrator). September 2001 - April 2002. Maintained research lab, running many operating systems, and help co-ordinate research projects.
• AeroNett Technologies Ltd. Graphics Artist & Data Entry Specialist. March 2000. Graphics editing (Adobe Photoshop) and data entry work.
• School District 41 Computer Support Services. Computer Technician. November 1999. Computer system repair, network maintenance.
• Evergreen Communications. Graphics Artist. September 1999 - December 1999. Graphics and photo editing (Adobe Photoshop) for a Buddhist photo-book.
• Orbit Computers. Owner. June 1997 - June 1998. Custom-assembled computers.

Consulting

• Gentoo deployments
• LDAP integration for Linux authentication
• iSCSI clients on Linux

Published Papers & Conference Talks

• Rogan Hamby, Robin Johnson and Galen Charlton. There and Back Again, Again. Evergreen 2013. April 10-13, 2013.
• Johnson, Robin H. Gentoo @ IsoHunt. Gentoo Miniconf 2012. October 20-21, 2012.
• Johnson, Robin H. & Groffen, F., Council and Trustees: Managing Gentoo. Gentoo Miniconf 2012. October 20-21, 2012.
• Johnson, Robin H. & Gentoo Infrastructure Team, State of Gentoo Infrastructure. Gentoo Miniconf 2012. October 20-21, 2012.
• Johnson, Robin H. State of Gentoo BoF. Ottawa Linux Symposium. June 13-16, 2010.
• Angenendt, R., Johnson, Robin H. Infrastructure round table. FOSDEM. Feburary 6-7, 2010.
• Johnson, Robin H. State of Gentoo BoF. Ottawa Linux Symposium. July 13-17, 2009.
• Johnson, Robin H. State of Gentoo BoF. Ottawa Linux Symposium. July 23-26, 2008.
• Lougheed P., Johnson R.H., Jordanov M., Bogyo B., Kumar V.S., Fee J., Securing electronic portfolios, International conference on ePortfolio, France, 2004.
• Fee J., Lougheed P., Brokenshire D., Bogyo B., Jordanov M., Johnson R.H., Kumar V.S., ePortfolio: issues for research, International conference on ePortfolio, France, 2004.
• Johnson, Robin H., Care & Feeding of phpMyAdmin and other veteran PHP applications. Vancouver PHP Conference. January 23rd, 2003.

Selected Current Projects

• Gentoo: Migration of main CVS tree to Git
• Gentoo: Specification and development of the tree-signing proposal
  [GLEP57, GLEP58, GLEP59, GLEP60, GLEP61, prototypes]; presently developing final code

Selected Past Projects

• Porting 2.4 kernel support for the MyCable XXS1500 (MIPS) to the 2.6 kernel. Porting Gentoo Linux to the MyCable XXS1500.
• Porting Gentoo Linux to SGI Visual Workstation 320 (VISWS@SourceForge, Gentoo-Wiki).
• Distributed System Architecture For Random Walk Analysis (Paper for Distributed Systems class).
• Comparision of Open Source Static-Analysis software tools (Paper for Computer Security class).
• Gentoo: Migration of Bugzilla-2.x to 3.x
• IsoHunt: Web2.0 Distributed Text Indexing

Knowledge

Operating systems:

• Linux (Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, Fedora, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake)

Skills:

Education

Summary

• Simon Fraser University @ Surrey, Fall 2002 - Winter 2005.
  Degree: Bachelor of Science (Information Technology, TechBC).
• Technical University of British Columbia, Fall 2001 - Winter 2002

Languages

• English (native)
• Afrikaans (fluent)
• Spanish (casual conversational)
• Latin (reading)
• Dutch, Italian, German, Polish (minimal survival)

References

Gary Fung
CEO, isoHunt Web Technologies Inc.

Gordon Pritchard, P.Eng.
Research Lab Manager
Simon Fraser University @ Surrey

Last updated:2013/Apr/12