Director of Engineering at Engine Yard
San Francisco Bay Area
- Current
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- Director of Engineering at Engine Yard
- Past
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- Director, Agile Methods and Practices at Yahoo! Emerging Markets
- Senior Agile Coach at Yahoo!
- Software Engineering Manager at AirWave Wireless, Inc. (purchased by Aruba Networks)
- Software Engineer at Club Photo
- Software Engineer at Tools, Inc (an Idea! Lab company)
- Software Engineer at Mobile Engines
- Programmer at Silicon Alchemy
- Tech Lab Lead at California State University, Chico
- Education
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- California State University-Chico
- Recommended
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22 people have recommended Joe - Connections
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- Websites
Joe Arnold’s Summary
Joe Arnold’s Specialties:
Engineering Management, Large-scale Agile adoption, Agile product management and user experience design, Extreme Programming, Scrum, kanban, lean, test-driven development, perl, enterprise software, network management software, wireless networking, mobile phone application development, user-generated content, social media & social software
Joe Arnold’s Experience
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Director of Engineering
Engine Yard
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)
June 2008 — Present (1 year 6 months)
Located in San Francisco, Engine Yard provides end-to-end, scalable solutions for products built with Ruby. Our server clusters and expert support staff will help deploy and scale Ruby applications.
The engineering team is providing solutions to make cloud computing a reality and bring Ruby development into the mainstream. I'm managing the teams that will make it happen! -
Director, Agile Methods and Practices
Yahoo! Emerging Markets
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
June 2007 — June 2008 (1 year 1 month)
On assignment in Bangalore, India, I took on a role to have more direct product development guidance for properties in the emerging markets. My efforts are spread across offices in Bangalore, Singapore, Sao Paulo and Miami - covering India, South East Asia and Latin America. I'm spearheading the effort to create an Agile organization.
Instigator and organizer of internal Hack Day and key organizer for ‘Hack Day India’ a public-facing developer event. (Search on Yahoo: 'Hack Day Joe Arnold') -
Senior Agile Coach
Yahoo!
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
February 2006 — June 2007 (1 year 5 months)
Yahoo! has one of the largest Agile implementations in the world. As a member of a very small and skilled coaching staff, we grew the Agile/Scrum team count from 25 to over 150 worldwide. Acting as an internal consultant, I coached, trained and evangelized Agile methods to make Yahoo! teams more effective.
Tech used / areas of focus:
Scrum, Product Management, User Stories, brainstorming, estimating and planning, test-driven development, PHPUnit, refactoring, continuous integration -
Software Engineering Manager
AirWave Wireless, Inc. (purchased by Aruba Networks)
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)
May 2002 — February 2006 (3 years 10 months)
AirWave Wireless builds web-based WiFi network management software for large-scale WiFi installations. Clients include Wells Fargo, Carrefour, Wendy’s Restaurants, Hewlett-Packard, and MIT. AirWave's speed and agility allowed the company to rise above the competition as our customer base grew and major networking gear providers became partners. AirWave has successfully secured an exit event and is now in the process of being acquired by Aruba Networks.
Utilizing Extreme Programming (XP) from day one, the development team delivered near zero-defect software to customers on a bi-weekly basis. This was a highly disciplined team that refused to allow defects, duplication or un-maintainable code into the system. Every line of code was pair-programmed (peer reviewed) and backed up by a unit test.
Tech used:
perl, apache, linux, SNMP, postgres, Extreme Programming, lean, test-driven development, refactoring, continuous integration, user stories -
Software Engineer
Club Photo
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
February 2001 — May 2002 (1 year 4 months)
Clubphoto was an early entrant photo sharing website. Our two innovations in the space were straight-to-web film (yes, as in 'roll of film') processing and building premium subscription services. (Like Flickr 'pro' accounts.)
Our team built all the software to make the site go. We built all the normal features you would expect from a photo-sharing website including: rolling our own shopping cart and credit card processing, image processing, web services to handle the processing of those pesky rolls of film, mass email notifications, and the bells and whistles to make premium subscriptions worth buying.
The premium subscription program was quite successful. We used continuous polling to ask users what features they would be the most likely to pay for. This user-driven approach to adding features led to a product that eclipsed all other sources of revenue (net) for the company.
Tech used:
Perl, mysql, apache, squid, PHP, XML, XPath, XSLT, javascript -
Software Engineer
Tools, Inc (an Idea! Lab company)
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)
September 2000 — January 2001 (5 months)
Tools was an Idea! Lab incubation company that combined a web browser tool bar with our own Cost Per Action (CPA) ad network. The browser tool bar could track user actions associated with an ad and reward the user with 'points' that were redeemable for prizes.
Utilizing Extreme Programming (XP), the team had the site online in a matter of a few months with real users and advertisers. The system would receive frequent, bug-free updates as new features were developed.
Our product manager, Greg Cohen, in an article how we worked: http://www.280group.com/insider/embracingagiledevelopment.pdf
Combined with a dramatic fall in online ad rates, the team was able to successfully disprove the business model to Idea! Lab in a matter of a few short months.
Tech used:
perl, mysql, linux, apache, Extreme Programming -
Software Engineer
Mobile Engines
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Telecommunications industry)
April 2000 — October 2000 (7 months)
The goal was to create fun, sticky mobile applications for the then-emerging mobile web so that carriers could increase their average revenue per subscriber.
We created some great mobile applications including:
- real-time radio song lookup
- HTML to WML translator (to see any web page on a mobile device)
- fantasy sports application
The entire company became early adopters of Extreme Programming (XP). Based on ideas sketched out on the 'C2 wiki' (the original wiki) the team implemented XP.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExtremeProgramming
Sadly, despite working applications, the company ran out of funding before any carriers got on board.
Tech used:
perl, Oracle, apache, linux, WML, SMS, Extreme Programming -
Programmer
Silicon Alchemy
(Computer & Network Security industry)
June 1999 — March 2000 (10 months)
Built really fast systems for credit card processing and fraud detection. I was also the guy heading down to the colo when a raid card was on fire.
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Tech Lab Lead
California State University, Chico
(Educational Institution; Education Management industry)
January 1997 — June 1999 (2 years 6 months)
Ran the PC computer labs in the computer science department while a student. Convinced the Dean that OpenGL graphics was a _requirement_ for the new (Team Fortress Quake) labs.
Joe Arnold’s Education
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California State University-Chico
BS in Computer Information Systems , Computer Science, Business , 1995 — 2000
Taught yo-yo classes at Bird in Hand. Which led to authoring a book: Yo-Yo Tricks: From Beginner to Spinner, Published by Prima Publishing, 1999
- Activities and Societies:
- Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, Tuba
Additional Information
Joe Arnold’s Websites:
Joe Arnold’s Groups:
Agile 2007, Bangalore Yahoo! Hack Day 22-Feb-08
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Yahoo Employees and Alumni Group -
CSU Chico Computer Science Alumni and Friends
Joe Arnold’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
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