Chris Radcliffe

Assisting customers with with PlanetScale's technology, whether Database as a Service or PlanetScale-managed on-prem databases.

This was a brief stint to bring needed change and organization to Blurbs's engineering team, bringing on solid new technical talent and mindful leaders.

Drove the technology expansion of the e-book platform within ProQuest through organic growth and acquisition: • Architect for the full-stack e-book product. Continually evolved for scale and feature scope to match a rapidly expanding and ever-changing market, still the leader today. • Invented a new responsive streaming reader for the best browser-based user experience. Fostered new search, and collection methods using open source technologies such as SolrCloud, mongoDB, redis, and other caching and NoSQL technologies for performance and scaling. Continually leveraged public cloud methods and infrastructure (AWS). • Introduced and made key hires for machine learning and usage analytics for content recommendations. • Established technical analysis and acquisition strategies for multiple M&A efforts. • Aggressively adopted agile techniques through formal and informal team training. Established metrics and review processes for continual improvement and individual accountability. • Continually strengthened our patent portfolio and valuation through formal diligence and filings based on the work of outstanding engineers. • Always focused on finding and hiring the best, and established great teams and propelled great careers as a result!

Led pioneering technology evolution and rapid organizational growth through the academic e-book explosion. We began as a startup and emerged as the market leader with the best service and solutions for serious research. Acquired by ProQuest in 2011. • Transformed the technology stack for modularity and scale. Replaced browser plug-ins with HTML5 backed by Spring MVC, and replaced monolithic search with scalable Lucene and Solr. • Increased throughput with caching using Java services, memcached and open source messaging. • Re-organized teams for efficiency and focus, corresponding to tech layers rather than feature. Increased overall feature-release throughput and bench depth on each team. • Leveraged AWS S3 as a content backing store, and EC2 for multiple dev labs and experiments • Introduced formal QA automation methods (Selenium, TestRail)

Designed, built and scaled custom web-enabled data warehouses, under contract as Journeyman Software. Focus was on decision support systems decision support systems for Teleglobe, Canada: • Acquired and transformed massive amounts of phone-switch data ("big data" today) • Produced time-critical inference data with informed daily ad-placement decisions • Delivered all decision-level analytics on a custom web platform (java servlets).

Established one of the most innovative and full-featured video streaming Content Delivery Networks of the dot com era: • Developed and deployed advanced Edge Delivery services via Satellite Multicast • Expanded the business with Value Added Services (Ad-insertion, Syndication, Reporting). • Organized and grew the team, built to scale, and drove the technical acquisition process (M&A). At the time, iBeam was one of the largest, highest-throughput streaming networks ever built.

Drove technology projects and research that leveraged Intertrust DRM technology into key emerging markets: • Program management, product specification and design, engineering line management. • Contributed to key patents for protection of internet streaming media and electronic software distribution, and MPEG-4 DRM research. • Key content-streaming prototypes were the first practical demonstration of Intertrust technology, and provided impetus for the run-up to IPO.

NeXT was founded and led by Steve Jobs until he returned to Apple in late 1996. NeXT pioneered the modern personal graphical workstation with groundbreaking hardware and the Mach-based NeXTSTEP Operating System, later OpenSTEP: • NeXTSTEP Applications and Technology: Managed continuing application engineering on OpenSTEP and Windows NT ports, and experimental projects for merging Java and Objective-C object models and runtimes. • WebObjects: produced the first WebObjects Builder on both OpenSTEP and Windows NT. NeXT was sold to Apple in late 1996, and NeXTSTEP API’s and Objective-C still constitute the foundation of Apple’s OS X.

Informix was a leading relational database and Internet e-business infrastructure vendor, now part of IBM. Attained significant depth in C/C++ programming, UNIX internals and many facets of RDBMS/SQL (OLTP, Data Warehousing, distributed transactions and fault tolerance). Led many successful teams here.