Ben Cottrell

1.  Contact information

     Email: tamino@wolfhut.org

     Phone: 408-480-9653

     USPS:  547 W Washington Ave.
            Sunnyvale, CA 94086

2.  Skills

     o    Operating systems: Unix

     o    Languages: Python, C, C++, Bourne/sed/awk/etc, some Java

     o    Protocols: SMTP, DNS, DHCP, HTTP, SSL/TLS, SSH, LDAP, SNMP

     o    Crypto: OpenSSL, PKCS11, Thales nCore

     o    Databases:  SQL  (joins,  transactions,  nested queries, indexes,
          partial indexes, analytic functions)

     o    Some familiarity with: Kubernetes, Ansible, Kafka

3.  Experience

     WePay Inc. -- 06/2018 - current

          Site Reliability Engineer

          Wrote monitoring checks in Ruby  with  embedded  SQL  (MySQL  and
          Google  BigQuery)  and  Graphite  queries. Helped developers with
          debugging and determining root  causes.  Advocated  for  software
          design best practices.

          Accomplishments:

          o    Improved  monitoring  for  payments getting stuck in various
               stages of processing.

          o    Troubleshot and fixed production issues.

          o    Supported launch of: An in-house-developed  graph  database;
               An internal service to generate 1099 reports for the IRS; An
               internal service to integrate with the KYC system at WePay's
               parent company, JP Morgan Chase.

     Nominum Inc. (acquired by Akamai Technologies) -- 09/2011 - 11/2017

          Staff Software Engineer

          Worked on the HTTP proxy team, and before that the Data Engineer-
          ing team.  I wrote code in C, C++, and Python, I  wrote  software
          to  interface with and to run inside HSMs (Hardware Security Mod-
          ules), and I worked closely with the  Support  team  on  customer
          issues.

          Accomplishments:

          o    Wrote  an  online  X.509  Certificate  Authority with custom
               business logic preventing  certificates  from  being  issued
               unless they met certain criteria.

          o    Helped add HTTPS support to Nominum's HTTP proxy product.

          o    Built a system for normalizing, transforming, and publishing
               large amounts of DNS and IP address data,  both  to  support
               Nominum's web site blocking solution and also to feed inter-
               nal data science processes.

     Nominum Inc. -- 11/2006 - 12/2010

          Senior Software Engineer

          Worked on general engineering projects in Python and C.

          Accomplishments:

          o    Helped build a hosted DNS service. I worked on the  publish-
               ing of configuration deltas out to the edge servers, and the
               collection  and  processing  of  statistics  and  aggregated
               query-log data from those edge servers.

          o    Found  and fixed threading-related bugs in the Python inter-
               preter.  Submitted patches upstream.

     IronPort Systems Inc (later acquired by Cisco Systems)  --  06/2003  -
     11/2006

          Software Engineer

          Worked  on  the Mail Gateway Appliance team. Wrote code in Python
          and C using cooperative multithreading. Debugged complex  failure
          modes of distributed systems.

          Accomplishments:

          o    Took the peer-to-peer clustering feature from a prototype to
               production.  Configuration could be pushed from any node  in
               the cluster, administrative and monitoring commands could be
               run remotely against any node,  and  nodes  that  came  back
               online after being down would be brought back in sync.

4.  Ancient History

     Akamai Technologies Inc. -- Software Engineer II -- 11/2017 - 06/2018

     Riverbed  Technology  Inc.  --  Senior  Software Engineer -- 12/2010 -
     08/2011

     Mail Abuse Prevention System  (MAPS)  LLC  --  Software  Developer  --
     01/2003 - 06/2003

     Nominum Inc. -- Software Engineer -- 12/2000 - 01/2003

     Stockmaster.com / Red Herring Magazine -- Software Engineer -- 06/1999
     - 12/2000

     Realize Communications -- Software Engineer -- 12/1997 - 06/1999

5.  References

     Available on request.