Sr. Software Engineer, 1998 November – 1999 July
Yahoo! GeoCities
former HQ: 4499 Glencoe Ave, Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Yahoo! GeoCities was rebranded Yahoo! Small Business. YSB maintains one of the largest and fastest growing on-line communities on the internet. While still GeoCities, its virtual communities were organized into themed neighborhoods. Massive visitor volume provided a substantial basis for e-commerce and advertising. And so in early 1999, Yahoo! bought GeoCities.
Nik co-designed and co-developed GeoBox, a distributed, fault tolerant deployment and management infrastructure to power all web services underlying GeoCities. Java class archives JARs served as the unit of deployment and distribution, including all necessary resources: images, properties files, etc. Once submitted to the repository, the class archives were automatically deployed to and launched from each generic GeoBox host configured to offer the distributed services in the network. The GeoBox infrastructure also provided automatic load balancing for the deployed distributed service instances.
Nik also designed and developed a web site visitor session data store. The session stores automatically balanced visitor session load across available servers. Visitor sessions were designed to expire after a (configurable) duration of neglect. The session stores automatically reclaimed the space in the database occupied by expired sessions. The session store process architecture optimized performance by making maximal advantage of the ObjectStore Cache Forward Architecture (CFA).
* Served as a lead software developer
* Co-architect / builder for an internet-based service delivery system
* Designed and built a distributed, fault tolerant visitor session data store with Java, ObjectStore
* Designed and built a distributed service infrastructure with Java, CORBA
* Designed and built a template-driven web page creation tool with Java