Ikai (藍奕凱) Lan

Current

Software Engineer at LinkedIn

Past

Engineering Consultant at CollegeCarrot
Systems Engineer at Citrix Systems
Systems Administrator at San Jose State University

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Education

San Jose State University
Lowell High School

Recommended

3 people have recommended Ikai (藍奕凱)

Connections

279 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

Ikai (藍奕凱) Lan’s Summary

I absolutely love technology and learning new, interesting things. I want to do it all! I've done helpdesk, network engineering, technical support, and pre-sales engineering, just to name a few. For the last few years, I've been working in web development with PHP, Python, and for the last job and current job, Ruby on Rails. As a result of many random projects for people, I've come to understand the full stack of web development: from the HTML/CSS front-end to optimizing MySQL, strategic use of MemCache to deliver performance, and all sorts of crazy architectures involving message queues, write through caches, reverse-proxy edge caching, and making use of CDNs.

In my free time, I like to diddle with mobile application development. I've looked at bit at the Google Android platform, but I'm spending more and more time digging into the Iphone SDK and Objective-C. Another of my interests is learning Scala. I'm pretty active on the Twitter Scala channel. Feel free to follow me: http://www.twitter.com/ikai

Another one of my goals for 2009 is to find technical conferences and meetups and to present at them. I like hacking, but I also like sharing the knowledge I've gained.

Ikai (藍奕凱) Lan’s Specialties:

- Ruby on Rails
- Learning Scala
- JavaScript
- I *can* do Python and PHP but really prefer not to
- Java, specifically when used with JRuby
- Gotta know my way around *Nix based systems (Ubuntu, Solaris, Debian, CentOS)!
- TCP/IP from my experience working with VoIP

Ikai (藍奕凱) Lan’s Experience

Software Engineer

LinkedIn

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

January 2008 — Present (1 year 7 months)

At LinkedIn, I work on the InApps platform, which follows Google's OpenSocial specification. The apps I work on comprise several technologies: Rails running on the JRuby VM, running inline Java, spitting out JSON, which is then processed on the client side using an early build of OSTemplates, a JavaScript templating engine. I never thought I'd learn so much about JavaScript in my life, but my disdain for it has turned into appreciation as I learn the JavaScript way to do things.

Before working on InApps, I worked on Bumper Sticker, one of the top five Facebook applications in the world, which at its peak, served 800 million pageviews a month. Bumper Sticker had a ton of issues. In the end, it turns out that what made the most difference was solving the concurrency issue of pre-2.2 Rails by making requests as quickly as possible with a system of asynchronous workers. That's not to say, however, that a CDN, edge caching, database optimization and MemCache didn't make a difference.
Engineering Consultant

CollegeCarrot

(Computer Software industry)

May 2007 — December 2007 (8 months)

This is when I picked up Ruby on Rails. Originally, I had started work in PHP, but after wasting a few days writing an ORM, then wasting another day trying to figure out how to get the MVC frameworks for PHP going, I finally drank the juice and dove head first into Ruby on Rails. Rails treated me pretty well, but as soon as we rolled into production, there were LOTS of issues! The first major issue I remember working on was the way you fork Mongrel processes to serve Rails and this interaction with Ferret, a Lucene based full text indexing engine.

In spite of all the problems I ran into, this was a very fun time for me, since this is where I really honed my skills as the go-to guy, being the ops guy, DBA, developer and IT guy all in one. I don't think I would have learned so much if I did something else during this time.
Systems Engineer

Citrix Systems

(Public Company; CTXS; Computer Software industry)

February 2005 — May 2007 (2 years 4 months)

I started at Citrix as a technical support contractor, supporting the Citrix SSL VPN product. I got my hands really dirty dealing with integrating that product with Windows Active Directory, load balancing, and general networking.

My group eventually became the Advanced Solutions Group, where I worked for engineering under the sales umbrella for the Application Gateway VoIP product. This was a customer facing position, and I had the opportunity to not only work with our channel partners Cisco, Avaya and Nortel in training their consultants to work with our product, but also directly with many of our customers. The most memorable projects I worked on here were:

- deployment of Avaya branded product at FIFA World Cup 2006
- deployment of touch screen environmental controls for Jumeirah Essex House in NYC
- integrating the Application Gateway product with the hospitality management system at Caesar's Palace and Wynn Las Vegas
Systems Administrator

San Jose State University

(Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

August 2002 — December 2004 (2 years 5 months)

When I was in college, I had a great opportunity to work for University Housing IT. Not only did this take care of any worries I had about paying the bills, but it also kickstarted my career in tech.

During the school year I worked as a Peer Advisor for Residential Computing, which is a pretty fancy term for "Helpdesk Guy". I still run into people at meetups now and then who say, "Hey, you fixed my computer many years ago."

During the summer, I worked with a small team with the Assistant Director of IT to make sure we had all our systems go for when the students would move into the dorms. Realistically this meant a lot of grunt work, like validating connectivity, racking servers, and spending a lot of time in a really cold server room trying to figure out what was wrong with our buggy Alcatel equipment.

I also worked on a development project to try to streamline the help request system in ASP running on IIS. Never again.

Ikai (藍奕凱) Lan’s Education

San Jose State University

B.S. , Computer Science

Dean's list
Graduated with honors
Self supported through college

Activities and Societies:

Alpha Kappa Psi Business Fraternity
Lowell High School