Ron Rothman

Member of a small team that has built a world-class ad system—from the ground up. (CNET derives the majority of its $334MM revenue from advertising sales.)

Owner of key infrastructure components. Major measurable contributions:

• Authored and owned CNET's ad client, a highly performance-sensitive (>2000 requests/sec), multithreaded Apache module. Originally written on Solaris and subsequently ported to Linux. (Apache/C++/STL)
• Conceived and built a flexible, efficient framework for executing modular code. All ads served on CNET Networks (more than [redacted] million requests per day) flow through this framework. (C++/STL) Promoted reuse and extensibility, which enabled several subsequent features to be developed at minimal cost.
• Invented a novel (patent pending) advertising feature—Programmable Creatives—that $aved hours of workflow each week and enabled new ad revenue opportunitie$. (Perl)
• Led an effort to squeeze additional revenue from existing streams. Built an optimization engine (C++/STL) and back-end platform (Perl, Python) which delivered an untapped $[redacted]MM (2005).
• Designed and implemented a highly-configurable back-end subsystem which processes large (>1GB) data files (BDB) for run-time use by servers (Java)

• »  Heavily used technologies: Apache 2, C++ (with STL), Perl, Python, SQL (Sybase), Java

Representative projects included:

• Extended and maintained existing core applications (C++/SQL)
• Created a new billing system interface (essentially, a complex set of data transformations and feeds) to replace an outdated one. (Perl/SQL/Informix 4GL)
• Recognized a workflow bottleneck and, to alleviate it, built a new interface to the main database. Users saw a productivity increase of 5x. (ODBC/Microsoft Access)

• »  Heavily used technologies: C++, Perl, SQL (Informix 4GL)

Responsible for the client-side software running on home-users' set-top boxes. Designed and implemented an HTML user agent capable of rendering HTML on a television screen.

Primary challenge: the real-time and highly restricted environment imposed by the set-top box—limited memory (2MB) and processing power (Motorola 68000 CPU).

• »  Heavily used technologies: C

As a member of the company's core technology group, participated in the following efforts:

• Designed, implemented and maintained several high-performance persistence systems for use by other projects. The company's primary product line relied heavily on recoverability; these systems allowed efficient persistent storage and recovery of critical data structures.

  Wrote three separate persistence libraries during my tenure, supporting various platforms: Solaris/IRIX, C++ over Oracle (PRO*C and PL/SQL), C/C++ over Raima Data Manager (a network-model DBMS)

• Designed and developed a software security system to enforce licensing policies of our software products. Used advanced hashing algorithms (SHA) to prevent license violations and unauthorized use. This module was written in C (with lex/yacc) and was integrated into both UNIX and Windows NT (Visual Basic) applications. Successfully protected several deployed systems in the field.

• Initiated and led the creation of a corporate intranet.

  Began with an automated timesheet application (CGI/Perl on Apache/FastCGI) which solved a long-standing internal company problem—poor project time reporting and accounting. Demand quickly grew for similar intranet systems and the effort eventually included an indexed and searchable Electronic Document Library and a fully-automated e-mail archive.

• »  Heavily used technologies: C, database (SQL, Oracle, Raima)

Entry-level position. Was given a surprisingly high degree of responsibility. Learned what bad code was (by writing it) and what good code was (by rewriting the bad code).

• »  Heavily used technologies: C, SQL (Oracle PRO*C), Vermont Views (GUI framework)

• 4.0 GPA
• NSF Graduate Fellow, Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technology

• 3.8 C.S. GPA
• President and Founding Member of Northwestern University chapter of Theta Tau Professional Engineering Fraternity