Christopher Zorn
Work experience
Zillow Group August 2019 — Present
Zillow Group is a real-estate company with many brands and products. It is known for its core product Zillow.com
- Improving developer velocity and productivity by building continuous integration and delivery solutions for many of the company's brands and products using Python, Golang, and Gitlab.
- Automating testing solutions to better service predictability and management using Python, Pytest, Javascript, Bash, Locust and Golang.
- Engineering cluster and service catalogs and tools for managing and deploying a platform and its services using Golang and Kubernetes.
- Developing a workload run-time platform for Zillow Group software developer groups to handle their solutions and products using Kubernetes and a collection of open source and in-house operators and services.
June Life, Inc. Jan 2016 — August 2019
June Life, Inc. is a smart kitchen appliance company known for its oven. https://juneoven.com/
- Built real-time messaging services and processing real-time events, images, video and data from appliances to provide data to applications for users and internal business using Python, gRPC, Kinesis, Lambda, and Dynamodb.
- Implemented data analytics collection and processing from ovens using Python, Tornado, Protobufs, Logstash, Amazon Lambda, Dynamodb, Kafka, Elasticsearch and Graphite.
- Built an Amazon skill for Alexa interaction with June Ovens.
- Implemented a recipe application server and "cook programs" service for appliances and companions using Python, Flask, Redis, Celery, SQLAlchemy, Postgresql.
- Built automated testing and bench marking for analyzing and testing June services using Python, Statsd, Elasticsearch, and MZbench.
- Automated continuous integration, delivery, deployment and service scaling using Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Python.
Machine Zone March 2014 — Dec 2015
Machine Zone, Inc. is a technology game company known for its mobile MMO games Mobile Strike and Game of War.
- Mochi Media's engineering team was acquired by Machine Zone.
- Designed, engineered and maintained platform services used by Machine Zone's games that hosted hundreds of thousands of simultaneous game players and generated millions of messages.
- Implemented next generation messaging system in Erlang and C.
- Built a test framework for behavior, integration, and benching platform's services using Erlang, Behave, and Python.
- Implemented continuous deployment mechanisms for the platform services using Go.cd, Docker, Internal Cloud service, Ansible, Make and Python.
Mochi Media Jan 2011 — March 2014
Mochi Media was a web game ad network and API platform.
- Led
the engineering team in implementing and maintaining the Mochi API
platform which includes advertising, distribution, analytics, game data
storage, achievements and scores.
- Platform handled over 80 million unique game plays per month.
- Ad server handled over 30 million ad requests per day.
- Platform was a mix of technologies that include Erlang, nginx, Actionscript, Python, Postgresql, mnesia, Riak and HBase.
- Created and delivered new advertising services.
- Managed engineers on these and other platform engineering projects shipping quality software in a timely manner.
- Designed
and implemented data processing and analytics backend for
handling advertiser's, publisher's, developer's and Mochi's data.
- Created in house ETL using Python and Hadoop to process logs and data generated from platform systems.
- Built storage system using HDFS, HIVE, and HBase.
- Built API interface to this data using Python and Twisted Python framework.
Collecta 2009 — 2010
Collecta was a startup that built a real-time push based search engine. It handled thousands of searches sending data to thousands of concurrent users. The platform processed
data at a rate of over 10k messages a second from many social website,
blogs and systems including Twitter, Identica, Wordpress, Myspace, and
others. It presented the user with a search result less than 40-400ms after publish.
- Created, prototyped and implemented real-time push based search engine and API using XMPP, JSON, Pubsubhubbub, Ejabberd, Erlang and Python.
- Designed and implemented a traditional index based search engine and API using XMPP, JSON, Erlang, Solr, and Couchdb.
- Built a test framework using Twisted Python and Amazon ec2 to test various parts of the system including API and backend.
Chesspark 2006 — 2009
Chesspark was a startup with real-time game platform and API used to build social chess products like chesspark.com and wuchess.com.
- Created, prototyped and implemented real-time push based search engine and API using XMPP, JSON, Pubsubhubbub, Ejabberd, Erlang and Python.
- Designed and implemented a traditional index based search engine and API using XMPP, JSON, Erlang, Solr, and Couchdb.
- Built a test framework using Twisted Python and Amazon ec2 to test various parts of the system including API and backend.
Medical University of South Carolina 1999 — 2006
- Created and implemented integration API for various University services to quickly gather information for accreditation auditors using Django and Python.
- Built a workflow system used by University researchers, HR and risk management to handled document creation and processing.
- Designed and created many web based systems for researchers using many different technologies including Perl, PHP, Python, Apache, Nginx, Java, XMPP and PDF.
- Engaged in many research and development projects to help improve the medical university.
- Taught researchers and other technology departments new software, programming languages and technology.
Qualifications
- Polyglot software engineer, strong in problem solving using the following languages: Python, Golang, Erlang, Javascript, Rust, Actionscript, PHP, Java, Ruby, Objective C, C, C++
- Created and Contributed to various open source projects.
- https://github.com/twonds/ and https://github.com/mochi
- Punjab - A BOSH connection manager written in twisted python - https://github.com/twonds/punjab
- Wokkel - A XMPP framework for twisted python - http://wokkel.ik.nu/
- Palaver - A multi-user chat XMPP component backend - https://github.com/twonds/palaver
- Strophe, Strophe.js - A C and Javascript client library for XMPP and BOSH/XMPP - http://strophe.im/
- Other small contributions to Twisted, Ejabberd, and Django.
- Consulted with large and small companies on messaging and XMPP projects.
- Contracted and consulted on many web based API and web site projects using various technologies.
- Worked with the following database and storage systems: Redis, Postgresql, Riak, Hbase, Mnesia, Couchdb, Mysql, Memcache and others.
Education
Computer Science Fall 1996 — Spring 2000
Obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer
Science with extra classes and work on databases, wearable computing and
graphics.