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Mike Ree, Distributed Systems Developer in Seattle, WA, United States
Mike Ree

Distributed Systems Developer in Seattle, WA, United States

Member since October 26, 2018
For over fifteen years, Mike has offered search, analytics, real-time distributed big data processing, and custom natural language processing (NLP) solutions for over fifty Fortune 500 companies. His clients have included government agencies, airlines, banks, law firms, pharmaceutical companies, medical insurance agencies, as well as some of the biggest names in technology.
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Portfolio

Experience

Location

Seattle, WA, United States

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Subversion (SVN), Go, Java, Git, IntelliJ, Linux, Windows

The most amazing...

...thing I've designed and patented was an algorithm for a conceptual search which increased sales by 25% compared to the previous experience.

Employment

  • CEO

    2015 - PRESENT
    MRS Enterprise Solutions LLC
    • Developed a custom NLP-based query parser and query suggester allowing understanding of natural language queries that was capable of understanding complex queries with dynamic concepts such as “employees who have worked in San Francisco or LA with 5-to-7 years of tenure”.
    • Created an extensible content analysis pipeline framework with the ability to gather real-time insights and make live modifications to the analysis stream.
    • Built a custom web crawler that is capable of crawling websites, databases, file shares, SharePoint documentation, OpenText, and virtually any other content source with extension; released under PerfectingSearch.com.
    • Helped shape a company that is currently leased by two Fortune 500 companies and that currently has a reseller agreement with other companies to resell MRS Software.
    Technologies: Finite-state Transducers (FST), Solr, Elasticsearch, Natural Language Processing (NLP)

  • Architect

    2009 - PRESENT
    Health Global Connect
    • Led a startup of seven developers in the release of a social networking site aimed at assisting people with terminal illnesses; a place where they could contact each other and seek moral support.
    • Designed a multi-hierarchical taxonomy that organized the content according to its users; it was sourced by scraping multiple medical feeds.
    • Successfully deployed multiple releases to production.
    Technologies: JavaScript, Zend Framework, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux

  • Director of Enterprise Architecture

    2016 - 2018
    SQAD, Inc.
    • Inherited an application that took approximately five minutes to compile a page of information and optimized the process so that it could compile over 100,000 pages in less than a minute; it also now support requests of over 100 million pages.
    • Developed a custom framework in Elasticsearch (custom plugins), S3, EFS, custom binary files, custom-managed caching layers, and custom binary files to achieve the above results. (Note: The results took about two years with four major releases to achieve.).
    • Designed all of the initial business requirements, architectural overview, and data strategy to create the first release of SQAD’s new flagship Sass application.
    • Worked directly with the CEO, CTO, CFO, product director, and marketing director to review business ideas and strategy for release to help build a cohesive strategy for the product.
    • Focused efforts on processing analytics of over 32 terabytes of current data in real time with plans to expand to over 150 terabytes.
    • Led a team in redesigning the core architecture to reduce network overhead and decrease the time to market—allowing for a more agile process.
    • Captured the metrics on the performance of all aspects of our infrastructure to better prioritize the optimization efforts.
    Technologies: Hadoop, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon EFS, Logstash, Kibana, Solr, Elasticsearch, Go, Java

  • Senior Technical Architect

    2014 - 2016
    Perficient
    • Deployed 40+ Google Search Appliances for multiple Fortune 50-to-500 companies.
    • Designed custom analytic engines using Elastic and Solr for multiple enterprise companies.
    • Provided week-long training sessions in Solr, Elasticsearch, Nutch, Kafka, and ZooKeeper.
    • Traveled alongside Google sales representatives as a technical expert—teaching others how to configure searches for large corporate deployments.
    • Designed a custom knowledge base search experience by creating NLP-based questions and answers using Solr, GSA, and MRS Enterprise Solutions NLP solutions.
    Technologies: Apache ZooKeeper, Apache Kafka, Nutch, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Google Search Appliance, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Java, Solr

  • Senior Search Architect

    2013 - 2013
    Quintiles
    • Designed a search system to handle multibillion rows of data.
    • Created a custom forked version of Solr to handle new complex requirements not capable within Solr; specifically, performing a relational analysis of data at query time.
    • Developed a solution that outperforms all of the existing in-house solutions.
    • Led a team of three Solr developers in the effort to create solutions.
    • Founded Lucid Works, the company behind Solr which used my source code to demo capabilities of extending Solr for time-series data.
    Technologies: MySQL, Hadoop, Solr, Java

  • Senior Search Expert

    2012 - 2013
    OpenSource Connections
    • Designed and prototyped Solr solutions that are capable of performing 300 updates per second with 400 queries per second on a quickly evolving data set for Cisco.
    • Performed a batch text analysis of patents for the US Patent Trademark Office in the design of a custom engine/syntax parser/full patent highlighter; used Hadoop.
    • Assisted in the design for the infrastructure to support a Chinese patent search for the US Patent Trademark Office.
    • Worked for Eric Pugh (co-author of Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server).
    • Attended Solr/Lucene Revolution 2013.
    Technologies: MySQL, Cassandra, Hadoop, Solr, Java

  • Solutions Architect

    2012 - 2012
    Capital One
    • Led the architectural design of new projects.
    • Designed ShareBuilder.com’s first project utilizing SOA concepts.
    • Led the architecture in the efforts to improve the UI performance—decreased the page load times by 50%.
    • Worked with the enterprise architecture team to maximize reuse and reduce developer expenses.
    • Independently oversaw multiple development teams.
    Technologies: Stored Procedure, MySQL, Java, C#, JavaScript, Angular, .NET

  • Lead Senior Search Developer

    2010 - 2012
    Corbis
    • Developed a patent with Corbis as the designer of their “More Like This” search algorithm: “A Proximity-Based Method For Determining Concept Relevance” - COR.P035.
    • Led teams of up to five developers in the successful release multiple products in C# and Java.
    • Received my “Apache Solr/Lucene Certified Developer” certification.
    • Attended Lucene Revolution 2011 along with Lucene Training and in 2012 along with Hadoop Training.
    • Committed a patch to Solr for a span query highlighter.
    Technologies: Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Hadoop, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), MySQL, Nutch, Solr, Java, .NET

  • Developer

    2008 - 2009
    T-Mobile
    • Led a contract project for the business analysis team to analyze outage information for the T-Mobile network.
    • Recreated existing Crystal reports through an internal portal on demand.
    • Created real-time generated graphs and dashboards for use by the BA team to analyze uptime information for all systems in T-Mobile's network.
    Technologies: JavaScript, Apache, PDF, MySQL, PHP

  • Consultant

    2004 - 2008
    OlyTech Design
    • Designed eCommerce websites for multiple local clients front start to finish.
    • Developed a large CMS with custom architecture for a business who cared for more than 20 autistic children located in more than six locations.
    • Managed and maintained compliance, internal messaging for employees, company notices, time sheets, and documentation repository for the above project.
    Technologies: JavaScript, Linux, Perl, Apache, Java, MySQL, PHP

  • Creator

    2001 - 2004
    OlyGamer
    • Ran the largest counter-strike gaming network in existence at the time.
    • Hosted multiple gaming servers using the University of Washington's and OGI School of Science and Engineering network to achieve the lowest ping of any server at the time.
    • Designed website, forums, and game statistics site for users to review the in-game statistics; receiving traffic of over 1 million visitors a month.
    • Submitted a patch to an in-game, AMX-MOD, for counter-strike admin tools.
    Technologies: Python, CSS, HTML, MySQL, PHP, Java

Experience

  • A Proximity-based Method for Determining Concept Relevance
    https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140089324?oq=A+Proximity-Based+Method+For+Determining+Concept+Relevance

    While at Corbis, I designed and fully implemented a conceptual search algorithm that utilized our existing taxonomy, along with clickstream data, to create a weighted model to find conceptually similar images. Our new implementation was over 3x as successful of converting customers to purchase than our previous and the company patented the technology.

  • US Patent Trademark Office | BRS Syntax Parser
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXiRYfFGHJE

    After being hired to rescue a failing project, I designed a new BRS syntax parser for Solr that required a custom forked version of Solr to implement. I then submitted a patch back to Solr for the Posting's Highlighter to allow the highlighting of the complex search requirements of BRS.

    The original developer presented on the work I was contracted to do. When he makes a reference to "we," he is actually referring to the work and solutions that I created.

  • Attended "Advanced Ultimate Go" at GopherCon 2018

    I attended Bill Kenedy's class on "Advanced Ultimate Go" at the 2018 GopherCon conference which focused on memory management, CPU caches, compiler optimizations, and microservice optimization.

  • Provisioning Online Games: A Traffic Analysis of a Busy Counter-Strike Server
    https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=compsci_fac

    I ran the largest Counter-Strike gaming network comprised of three physical servers running more than ten gaming servers of 32 players each, hosting up to 320 players at a time, having over 1 million players a month.

    Francis Chang was a player on one of my earlier servers and asked to use my network to analyze the performance of network traffic. I worked with Francis to deploy a server in his environment and provided a heavy user base to analyze.

Skills

  • Languages

    Java, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, C#, Go, Stored Procedure, PHP, Perl, Python

  • Frameworks

    Hadoop, Angular, Spring Boot, Spring, .NET, Zend Framework, Apache Spark, Javalin

  • Libraries/APIs

    Apache Lucene, AngularUI, jQuery, Facebook API, Android API, Node.js

  • Tools

    Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), IntelliJ, Apache Solr, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Apache Nutch, Angular CLI, Subversion (SVN), Git, Apache ZooKeeper, Solr, Kibana, Apache, Logstash

  • Paradigms

    Concurrent Programming, Microservices Architecture, Distributed Computing, Parallel Computing, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Microservices

  • Platforms

    Amazon EC2, Linux, Windows, Android, Apache Kafka, Apache Pig

  • Storage

    NoSQL, AWS Elastic File System, Elasticsearch, Relational Databases, MySQL, Cassandra, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon EFS, Apache Hive

  • Other

    Cloud, Distributed Systems, Big Data Architecture, Data Architecture, Architecture, GraphDB, RESTful Microservices, Finite-state Transducers (FST), Google Search Appliance, Nutch, PDF, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Apache Cassandra

  • Industry Expertise

    Security

Certifications

  • Apache Solr/Lucene Certified Developer
    SEPTEMBER 2012 - PRESENT
    CompTIA
  • ZCE Zend Certified Engineer in PHP 5
    JANUARY 2008 - PRESENT
    Zend
  • Microsoft Certified Professional 70-290
    JANUARY 2006 - PRESENT
    Microsoft
  • Security+
    MAY 2005 - PRESENT
    CompTIA
  • Network+
    JANUARY 2004 - PRESENT
    CompTIA
  • A+
    JANUARY 2003 - PRESENT
    CompTIA

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