CV / Resume: Justin Mason

Web: http://jmason.org/ -- Email: jm at jmason.org

OVERVIEW

Senior software engineer with experience in leading the design, development and operation of large-scale software projects.

EXPERIENCE

Systems Architect, Swrve, Inc. (Feb 2013 - present):

Built Swrve's scalable, distributed real-time event streaming mesh, handling billions of events per day reliably on AWS without data loss.
Built an event streaming system using AWS Kinesis, handling reliable high volume streaming ingestion into an Orc data store for later querying using Presto SQL queries.
Led the effort to instrument the Swrve codebase with service metrics, and built a set of Grafana dashboards to provide metric-driven alerting and monitoring.
Built several high-throughput web services and client libraries for push messaging protocols, using Hystrix circuit breakers, rate limiting, service metrics, and capacity controls to ensure reliability, operability and scalability.
Instigated continuous deployment and system tests covering the entire integrated Swrve software stack, using chromedriver and rspec, to ensure release quality.
"Dockerisation" of the Swrve platform for deployment to Amazon EKS.

SDE 2/3, Amazon.com (Dublin, Ireland) (Jul 2009 - Jan 2013):

Developing products and services to perform Amazon-scale active network monitoring. Our team's main project was a next-generation network monitoring system, to detect and triangulate network problems quickly and accurately in order to drive down MTTD and MTTR. This was composed of a fleet of servers running Jetty and Guice in Java, and a larger fleet of agents written in C++ with Boost.

Software Engineer, NewBay (Dublin, Ireland) (Dec 2008 - Jul 2009):

Working on server farm deployment automation, and building large-scale object storage web services in Java.

Software Engineer, PutPlace (Dublin, Ireland) (Nov 2007 - Dec 2008):

Scaling PutPlace's solutions using Amazon's EC2 and S3 web services; implemented a one-click deployment system to deploy fully production-ready grids of EC2-hosted servers.

VP, Apache SpamAssassin (July 2006 - July 2008), Project Management Committee Member, Apache SpamAssassin (July 2004 - 2014):

Deciding the architecture, development, goals and direction of the open-source Apache SpamAssassin project. see http://spamassassin.apache.org .

SKILLS

Specialities: Java, Linux, AWS, HTTP, TCP/IP, open source, anti-spam, mail, internet security, mail filtering, scalability

Programming languages, libraries and frameworks: Java, Python, Ruby, C++, C, Perl, sh/sed/awk/etc., AWS, Netty, protobuf, Avro, MySQL, DynamoDB, Presto, Parquet, Orc

Development methodologies: XP, Scrum, Kanban

Have built several highly-scalable web services in Java
over 20 years experience working with TCP/IP on various platforms, including HTTP/S and SMTP client and server implementations in a variety of languages.
Many years experience with AWS services, from EC2 and S3 onwards.
Created Apache SpamAssassin, the market-leading open-source spam filter product, used by an estimated 100 million users world-wide.
experience operating and administering a variety of multi-user UNIX systems.
Set up the first non-academic web server in Ireland, the 70th HTTP server in the world.

OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE

In addition to the commercial software development experience detailed above, I am the author of a number of free / open-source software projects. Highlights:

Apache SpamAssassin, a mail filter to detect and block unsolicited bulk email. I created the first version in 2001, and by now it is probably the most widely-used spam filter in the world, protecting around 100 million users world-wide. More info at http://spamassassin.apache.org .
PLP, a drop-in replacement for the UNIX "lpr" printer system. During my maintainership it eventually had over 10,000 users in over 100 sites. PLP was included in SuSE Linux, among other Linux distributions.

PUBLICATIONS

Justin Mason, New Features in SpamAssassin 3.2.0 Of Interest To Large Receivers, presentation, MAAWG Dublin 2007: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/PresentationsAndPapers
Henry Stern, Justin Mason, Michael Shepherd, A Linguistics-Based Attack on Personalised Statistical E-mail Classifiers. Technical report CS-2004-06, Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, March 2004. http://www.cs.dal.ca/research/techreports/2004/CS-2004-06.shtml
Justin Mason, Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics, presentation, Toorcon 2004: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/PresentationsAndPapers
Justin Mason, Filtering Spam With SpamAssassin, presentation, HEANet Annual Conference 2002: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/PresentationsAndPapers
Prof. Patrick Powell, Justin Mason, LPRng, An Enhanced Printer Spooler System. Paper presented at the USENIX Large Installations Systems Administration (LISA '95) conference. http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa95/papowell.html

INTERESTS AND OTHER PROJECTS

My interests include: SCUBA diving (PADI Advanced Diver certified), reading, design, copyright law, and open source software. I write a weblog at http://taint.org/ , which won Best Technology Blog in the 2009 Irish Blog Awards.

EDUCATION

1989 - 1990: BA degree in Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland; did not complete degree.