Christopher Zorn

E-mail: christopher.zorn@gmail.com

Work experience

Server Software Engineer

Currently at June Life, Inc. which is a smart kitchen appliance company known for its smart oven. https://juneoven.com/
Building real-time communication services between Appliance and Companion applications using Python, gRPC, Redis and Tornado.
Implementing data analytics collection and processing from ovens using Python, Tornado, Protobufs, Logstash, Amazon Lambda, Dynamodb, Kafka, Elasticsearch and Graphite.
Handling and processing real-time events, images, video and data from appliances to provide data to applications for users and business using Python, gRPC, Kinesis, Lambda, and dynamodb.
Building Amazon skill for Alexa interaction with June Ovens.
Implementing a recipe application server and "cook programs" service for appliances and companions using Python, Flask, Redis, Celery, SQLAlchemy, Postgresql.
Building automated testing and bench marking for analyzing and testing june services using Python, statsd, elasticsearch, and mzbench.
Implementing Authentication and Authorization for June devices and subscriptions using Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Postgres and gRPC.
Automating continuous integration, delivery, deployment and service scaling using Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Python.

Senior Software Engineer

Mochi Media's engineering team was acquired by Machine Zone
Implemented and maintained platform services used by Machine Zone's games.
- Platform services helps run Game Of War: Fire Age one of the top grossing and played MMOs
- Platform can handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous game players that generate millions of messages.
Implemented next generation messaging system.
- Implementing core technologies in Erlang and C.
- Implementing test framework for behavior, integration, and benching platform's services using Erlang, Behave, and Python.
- Implementing continuous deployment mechanisms for the platform services using Go.cd, Docker, Internal Cloud service, Ansible, Make and Python.
Maintained chat, real-time translation, pubsub, timer (server side deferreds), and messaging services that use Erlang.

Lead Platform Engineer

Mochi Media was a web game ad network and API platform.
Lead 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.
Deployed scoreboard and achievements backend improvements that used Riak and statebox to replace mnesia.
- Reduced startup time of downed and new nodes.
- Improved reliability and availability of this data.
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.

Software Engineer and Co-founder

Collecta was a startup that built a real-time push based search engine.
- Handled thousands of searches sending data to thousands of concurrent users.
- 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.
- 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.

First Software Engineer

Chesspark was an online chess startup that hosted thousands of games, tournaments and players.
Designed and implemented XMPP based API for social interaction, game events, game messaging, game matching and game play.
Built backend using ejabberd, memcache, postgresql, twisted and python.
Implemented website using python, django, twisted and python.
Created test framework using twisted python and amazon ec2 to replay logged API/XMPP data that would mimic the live production system in a test environment.

Instructor and Software Engineer

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.
- Built using XML, XMPP, Twisted, Punjab, PHP, Python and postgresql.
- Used XML, HTML and PDF for manipulating and creating documents.
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.

Polyglot software engineer, strong in problem solving using the following languages: Python, 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.

College of Charleston

Obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science with extra classes and work on databases, wearable computing and graphics.