Mehmet Efe

Current

• Director at Shopzilla, Inc. (E. W. Scripps)

Past

• Senior Manager at Shopzilla, Inc.
• QA Lead at Yahoo! Inc.
• Release and QA Manager at Laureate Education Inc.

• Sr. Systems Administrator at Laureate Education Inc.
• Lead Technologist at Fabric Interactive & Linkfinity
• Lead Design Technologist at Frog Design Inc.
• Production Specialist & Design Technologist at Frog Design
• Lead Web Developer at Olive Design
• Web Consultant at Independent (Self-employed)

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Education

• University of Istanbul / Fac. of Communication

Recommended

31 people have recommended Mehmet

Connections

285 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• My Company
• My Company

Mehmet Efe’s Summary

"An exceptional generalist in IT/IS field with exceptional Agility."

Bachelors Degree in Communication Arts.
10 years of hands-on professional, enterprise level experience in IS / IT, Web development and QA.

A decade of Professional Journalistic career before getting into IT. While working as a writer in Istanbul, Mehmet discovered the Net. He moved to Los Angeles for a master's degree in Film and became a permanent U.S. resident in 1997. He mastered HTML and JavaScript before English. In 1997, he was with OliveDesign in Austin as Lead Developer and worked for clients like HP (Hewlett Packard), Pervasive and web sites like Garden.com. In 1999, he became Digital Media Production Specialist at FrogDesign, one of the oldest and biggest design companies in the World, and served clients like Apple, Sony, Motorola, Intel, Microsoft. His third book was published while working as a Design Technologist at the San Francisco office of FrogDesign. At Frog, he worked for clients and on enterprise projects like ZuluSports, MySmart, TalkCity, Living, eBenefits, Rentals.com, Access, Intel, Covalent, Trintech, Intershop and Symantec (If you're using Norton Anti-virus, you're looking at his development work).

A track record of driving high-impact projects requiring strategic thinking, analysis, business planning and execution. Strong experience with enterprise consultation, IT/IS, software release and distribution.

Good team building and leading experience with organization, project management skills, excellent verbal and written communication skills. Knows well howto define and delegate roles and tasks, allocate resources and facilitate communication between stakeholders, dealing effectively with staff at all levels.

Mehmet has an ongoing passion for www interactivity, a very rich background related to media and over 10 years of hands-on craftsmanship and hard-earned industry expertise in n-tier IS/IT development under his belt and you know you need him. ;-)

Mehmet Efe’s Specialties:

Exceptional experience in SDLC Quality Assurance and large scale multi-tier architecture and development projects. (XP, Agile / SCRUM) QA, Release and Change Mgmt, Technical Leadership & Project Mgmt, solid experience in Network & Systems Administration (Unix -Solaris- /Linux & Windows), Proficiency in UNIX Shell, experience in Perl, PHP, Java, .NET, Web Services. Indepth Apache. Strong scripting, test automation. QA, WWW, RDBMS, HTML / XHTML, CSS, JS, HTTP, SSL, TCP/IP, CVS, SSCM, SVN, SOA, SOX

Mehmet Efe’s Experience

• Director

  Shopzilla, Inc. (E. W. Scripps)

  (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; SSP; Information Services industry)

  November 2007 — Present (11 months)

  Hands-on management of more than a dozen of Quality Assurance Engineering teams for the entire enterprise supporting 100% of company revenue. Building the next generation, high performance QA team. Reporting to VP of Engineering. (Agile / SCRUM, Unix / Linux, Sybase, Oracle, J2EE, Perl)

• Senior Manager

  Shopzilla, Inc.

  (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; SSP; Information Technology and Services industry)

  December 2006 — December 2007 (1 year 1 month)

  Shopzilla is an E. W. Scripps company. (http://www.scripps.com)
  Hands-on management of Quality Assurance teams for 3 verticals (including 2 critical new initiatives and search marketing, consumer acquision operations), supporting more than 60% of company revenue. (Agile / SCRUM, Unix / Linux, Sybase, Oracle, J2EE, Perl)

• QA Lead

  Yahoo! Inc.

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2006 — December 2006 (1 year)

  QA Lead on the biggest project Yahoo ever undertook, namely, Project Panama for Yahoo Search Marketing.
  
  Lead, managed, mentored a team of QA Engineers. (Hands-on lead close to 5000 test cases). Played a critical role in successfully delivering Panama to production.
  
  Initiated, organized and lead QA Summit at Yahoo headquarters.
  
  Developed and presented to Yahoo! YSM QA team a special lecture, titled 'How the Web Works from QA P.O.V.' In which covered fundamentals of client-server technologies, Web 2.0, and QA Role in Agile.
  
  Developed Master QA Test Plans, and Release Plan Template for multiple QA teams.
  
  Developed and lead the implementation of Automation Framework with multiple APIS, with integration to continous build and release process.
  
  Pro-actively partnered with Product Managers and Engineering Managers.
  
  Championed and participated in change-management process. Influenced seamless collaboration between multi-location teams.
  
  Received L2 Security Clearence.

• Release and QA Manager

  Laureate Education Inc.

  (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; LAUR; Higher Education industry)

  May 2002 — November 2005 (3 years 7 months)

  Leading maintenance, release management and quality assurance of many high-volume websites, n-tier client/server enterprise applications, (multi-tier architecture) on Unix/Linux and Windows platforms. Serving multiple universities, involving course delivery, CRM, CMS, DBMS, integration frameworks, load balanced deployment and more.
  
  Established, built and actively spear-head change management process in IT and web and applications development accross the board. Introduced, developed and lead the efforts in establishing and adopting standards, dependency management, QA and testing, build, configuration and release management; including developing, evaluating, deploying tools and application suites and training, assisting team members; developing release strategies, functional, regression, load/stress and performance tests, white/black-box tests and more.
  
  Performing key role in Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance and helping organization overcome the pains of fast growth.

• Sr. Systems Administrator

  Laureate Education Inc.

  (Educational Institution; 5001-10,000 employees; LAUR; Information Technology and Services industry)

  May 2002 — November 2005 (3 years 7 months)

  Responsible for up-time & reliability of a multi-location large-scale NOC backend. Managing tens of Enterprise Unix Systems (Solaris 2.X & Linux). Helping bringing Unix and Windows environments work in a seamless fashion; contributing to a collaborative relationship between IT/IS and Web & Applications Development teams.
  
  Putting in good use years of experience in UNIX and Shell, BIND, DNS, Apache, Sendmail, WU-IMAP, TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, SSH, GCC; security and rescue technologies and OSI model and networking fundamentals; TLS, VTL, Netbackup, NAS, NFS, RAID, clustering, fiber, SAN, vSAN, Veritas, EMC. Including active monitoring techniques for high availability and more...
  
  Interviewing and participating in hiring process for Unix Administrators and release managers. Managing and training Unix administrators.
  
  Developing disaster recovery, fault tolerance and backup strategies. Actively heading migration, integration and/or decommissioning of legacy applications and processes.

• Lead Technologist

  Fabric Interactive & Linkfinity

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  September 2001 — May 2003 (1 year 9 months)

  Several websites, intranets, extranets, applications, content-management systems, digital media presentations. Business development, proposals, client pitches, developing cross-platform sites, information architecture, code libraries, templates, scopes, wireframes, presentations, researching and developing tools, developing style/implementation guides, Developing a plan for technology, building DM Tech Team and leading. Communicating with client, design and creative team and producers to meet requirements as well as assist the process, define the roles and requirements and develop deliverables for various companies.
  
  Served customers and led projects like: http://www.decore.com (CRM, CMS, IA), Daimler Chrysler (CMS, IA), SEGWAY (CMS, Extranet), Gallaudet University (Intranet, CMS)

• Lead Design Technologist

  Frog Design Inc.

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  April 2001 — July 2001 (4 months)

  Reporting to CTO. Responsible for building and leading Digital Media Technology team at the newly established Los Angeles office. (Operations stopped due to economical down-turn.)
  
  Active participant to all technological aspects of projects, as well as project management as leading technologist.
  
  Participating in business development, proposals, client pitches. Responsibility of DM Tech Team and leading. Communicating with client, design and creative team and producers to meet requirements as well as assist the process, define the roles and requirements and develop deliverables.

• Production Specialist & Design Technologist

  Frog Design

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  1999 — 2001 (2 years)

  • Hands-on front-end/UI development for large-scale enterprise projects. Project management as leading technologist.
  
  • Participating in all phases of the process. Communicating with clients, design and creative teams and producers to meet requirements as well as assist the process, define the roles and requirements and develop deliverables, code templates, code libraries, rich media, and implementation guides as required.
  
  • Assessing and meeting production requirements as well as quality assurance of each project.
  
  • Researching, prototyping and assisting design process with solutions and tools to increase efficiency of the production process.
  
  • Served clients and led projects like: ZuluSports, TalkCity, UmeVoice, eBenefits, Rentals.com, MySmart.com (Saved company 20 million dollars by camping in the office for 82 hours straight!), Symantec (Leading technologist for application UI and web integration. Developed currently used Norton UI.), Access.de, Intershop, Intel.

• Lead Web Developer

  Olive Design

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  August 1997 — August 1999 (2 years 1 month)

  • Mastering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl
  • Image/graphic and code optimization
  • Scripting and cross platform web development
  • E-commerce solutions, Online Marketing solutions
  • Served clients and technical leadings on projects like: Garden.com, Pervasive Software (pervasive.com), RYKA Shoes (ryka.com), Karma International, and Hewlett Packard HP (Intranet).

• Web Consultant

  Independent (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; Myself Only; Information Technology and Services industry)

  1995 — 1997 (2 years)

Mehmet Efe’s Education

• University of Istanbul / Fac. of Communication

  Bachelors, Communication Arts, September 1986 — September 1992

  3 Published books.
  4 stage plays (produced and staged nation-wide)
  Director, Producer and Writer at Channel 6 (Europe)
  Publisher/Editor of 3 Monthly, 1 weekly Magazines and 1 daily newspaper.

Additional Information

Mehmet Efe’s Websites:

• My Company
• My Company

Mehmet Efe’s Interests:

www, Linux, Open Source, Quality Assurance, QA, Business Development, Agile, XP, Agile / XP, Scrum, and Justice For All,,, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” -- Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love"

Mehmet Efe’s Groups:

Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN)
Free Software Foundation (FSF)

•    Yahoo Alums
•    APLN
•    Agile Alliance
•    Open Source
•    Green

Mehmet Efe’s Honors:

I honor those who are true to themselves and to those around them.
I award the genuine.

Mehmet Efe’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch