Justin Swanhart

Current

Sr. Database Administrator at Gazillion Entertainment

Past

MySQL Czar at Kickfire
Senior Consulting Engineer at Kickfire
Database Architect at AdBrite

MySQL Geek at Proven Scaling, LLC
Platform DBA / Technical Yahoo! at Yahoo!
Solutions consultant at Serene Corporation
Sr. Programmer Analyst at El Dorado Sales
Programmer Analyst at WEA Manufacturing / AOL Time Warner
Process Architect at Pride Mobility Products
Sales Engineer at Northeast Micro

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Recommended

10 people have recommended Justin

Connections

189 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Justin Swanhart’s Summary

In all my roles, I find inventive solutions for hard to solve problems. I have been described by friends and associates as a 'computational thinker', a maven and a cross-pollinator of ideas. I have a knack for combining seemingly disparate ideas into inventive solutions for existing problems.

Justin Swanhart’s Specialties:

database design and architecture, performance tuning, php development, troubleshooting, administration

Justin Swanhart’s Experience

Sr. Database Administrator

Gazillion Entertainment

(Privately Held; Entertainment industry)

October 2009 — Present (2 months)
MySQL Czar

Kickfire

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

January 2009 — August 2009 (8 months)

As MySQL Czar my primary role was testing the “Kickfire Analytic Appliance for MySQL” for compatibility and interoperability with the Sun MySQL database product. I interacted with the QA, Engineering, Marketing and Technical Services teams to identify issues with the appliance, helped plan future technical and functional requirements and provided internal and external education about the appliance. A regular blogger on the Kickfire web site, I authored the bulk of the technical blog posts about the Kickfire appliance as well as contributing to the Kickfire documentation, including the DDL, DML, transactions and indexing chapters of the Kickfire manual.
Senior Consulting Engineer

Kickfire

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

May 2008 — January 2009 (9 months)

I was hired immediately after the company came out of stealth mode in 2008. I was involved in the early adopter and beta release programs, directly supporting the initial customer testing of the Kickfire appliance. I developed data migration scripts and tools along with MySQL proxy scripts and other tools to work around issues or implement missing features. I directly interacted with customers in the Bay Area and traveled to Texas and Pennsylvania in support of customers there.
Database Architect

AdBrite

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

February 2007 — April 2008 (1 year 3 months)

I was responsible for design, tuning and support of AdBrite's extensive MySQL infrastructure of over 1400 MySQL database servers as part of a three member DBA team. I was responsible for several ad serving infrastructure improvements, data replication improvements and caching layer improvements, which when combined resulted in less downtime and faster ad serving times. I developed tools to assist in the monitoring and load balancing of HTTP (web servers), MySQL and other
network services requiring high availability. Almost all of my work was done in PHP.

I also developed flexviews, an open source (LGPL) toolkit for building and maintaining materialized views for MySQL.
MySQL Geek

Proven Scaling, LLC

(Information Technology and Services industry)

November 2006 — August 2007 (10 months)

Provide consulting and advice in the areas of performance tuning, database design and scalability. In this position I had a small number of web 2.0 LAMP customers which I did ongoing work for on a regular basis. I installed and tuned memcache layers, made modifications to data access layers, tuned databases, upgraded databases to newer MySQL versions and upgraded customers from MyISAM to InnoDB. I also created a Lucene based database search application with SOLR. Most of my work involved PHP scripting.
Platform DBA / Technical Yahoo!

Yahoo!

(Public Company; YHOO; Internet industry)

August 2005 — November 2006 (1 year 4 months)

As the platform engineering DBA, I was responsible for production databases for key engineering systems. I successfully migrated the Bugzilla database to a newer version of MySQL, using the InnoDB strorage engine. This resulted in much higher availability and scalability for a key component of the engineering infrastructure. I was also responsible for maintaining large MySQL databases for metrics collection for the Yahoo Monitoring Team (yMON). In addition, I was an active participant on internal MySQL support mailing lists, providing MySQL advice to a large part of the user base at Yahoo. I was also the primary developer of internal tools for the 'Big Thinkers' campaign, designed to draw world class talent to Yahoo.
Solutions consultant

Serene Corporation

(Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)

March 2005 — August 2005 (6 months)

As a consultant with Serene, I was tasked with creating an acquisition management application for the Corporate Development department at Yahoo. The PHP application handles time tracking, milestone creation and reporting, progress charting, team dependencies and more. This application is used by executives and features dashboards to identify problem projects at a glance. At the end of my contract I applied for and received a full time position in the Platform Engineering department.
Sr. Programmer Analyst

El Dorado Sales

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

April 2002 — December 2004 (2 years 9 months)

Responsible for primary development and maintenance of Easynews.com, the world's premier Usenet provider. Implement, deploy and support Oracle 9iR2 and MySQL 4.1 databases. Developed multimedia (video) thumbnailing applications, PAR file support tools, and other key portions of Easynews.com
Programmer Analyst

WEA Manufacturing / AOL Time Warner

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Plastics industry)

2001 — 2002 (1 year )

Develop web applications for order entry, billing, invoicing and inventory as front-ends for Oracle Applications 11. Responsible for extensive development of Intranet applications, including BOM front-ends and reports. Write reports and applications agains AR, PO, BOM, INV, WIP and OE.
Process Architect

Pride Mobility Products

(Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Medical Devices industry)

October 1997 — March 2001 (3 years 6 months)

Developed a replacement order entry interface for Oracle Apps 11 w/ a fully integrated custom rule-based configurator for complex order entry tasks. Developed invoicing, bill of material, warehouse (pick/pull)/inventroy/order entry/accounts receivable/GL/etc applications to complement Oracle Applications modules. Developed invoice printing and envelope stuffing applications, call center applications, customer web interfaces and provided internal application, desktop and unix support to the IT department.
Sales Engineer

Northeast Micro

(Information Technology and Services industry)

1996 — 1997 (1 year )

Northeast Micro is a value added reseller in northeastern Pennsylvania. During my time at NE Micro I developed software applications for network deployment, a single sign-on application for Windows NT 4.0 networks and I converted multiple customers from Novell/IPX to NT/TCP and cobol/dos applications to Windows. I was also involved in the design of a city-wide wireless MAN for the Wilkes-Barre area school district.