VP of Engineering, US at Wikia
San Francisco Bay Area
- Current
- Past
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- Engineering Manager at Wikia
- Architect - User Location Platform at Yahoo!
- Senior Technical Yahoo! - News at Yahoo!
- Web Development at Adicio
- Director of Development at Catalyst Communication
- Developer at Brassring
- Recommended
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17 people have recommended Nick - Connections
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197
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Nick Sullivan’s Summary
In my idealistic view, the goal of a computer programmer is to teach computers how to understand people. The better job I can do with this, the happier I am with my work. I enjoy thinking about how people think, and building software to make people's lives easier.
I'm a seasoned technology professional with nearly 10 years of web-based development experience that spans the full range of the product, from the original concept to a large scale rollout. I have experience leading development, user interface, and systems administration teams. I have a unique blend of strong communication skills, intelligence, and passion that makes for a key person in a technology company.
Nick Sullivan’s Specialties:
PHP, Linux, MySQL, Texis, XML, XSL, Scaling web applications, AJAX, Javascript, DHTML, Geographic tools, text search
Nick Sullivan’s Experience
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VP of Engineering, US
Wikia
(Privately Held; Internet industry)
January 2009 — Present (7 months)
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Mediawiki Consultant
Metacafe
(Privately Held; Internet industry)
December 2008 — Present (8 months)
Provide insight for Metacafe on how to properly implement, extend, and scale Mediawiki
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Geek
Wikinvest
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
March 2007 — Present (2 years 5 months)
Highly leveraged the Mediawiki platform to create a top notch site for information about investing.
http://www.wikinvest.com/?utm_source=ff&utm_medium=email&utm_term=nick
My role includes search technology, PHP expertise, and system administration, and heck, even a little SEO. -
Engineering Manager
Wikia
(Privately Held; Internet industry)
March 2008 — January 2009 (11 months)
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Architect - User Location Platform
Yahoo!
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
September 2007 — April 2008 (8 months)
Working on the company's #1 priority, I architected a new platform called User Location Platform (ULP), which will serve to help content and advertising to users based on their location.
When rolled out, this platform will service more than 10 billion transactions per day, in less than 10 milliseconds, and will be responsible for more than 800 million dollars a year in revenue for Yahoo!
Architecture for User Location Platform involved technical design, exploration of various technologies, prototyping, benchmarking, hardware ordering and estimation, documentation and authoring technical specifications for the C++ developers. -
Senior Technical Yahoo! - News
Yahoo!
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Computer Software industry)
February 2007 — September 2007 (8 months)
Service Engineering, Infrastructure, PHP, Perl, feed processing, Architectural planning for Yahoo! News, the largest News site online.
While I only worked with Yahoo! News for 5 months before being selected for a new role within Yahoo!, I helped in accomplishing three key initiatives:
- Contextual Shortcuts on Yahoo! News stories (mouseover div popups with related information for keywords)
- Flickr Integration with Yahoo! News stories
- Formed and lead a new group labeled the Infrastructure Group -- to solve technical infrastructure challenges permanently and completely instead of applying temporary solutions -
Web Development
Adicio
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)
August 2000 — February 2007 (6 years 7 months)
Technology leader; from writing code to establishing standards and making technology decisions. Architected and built suites of web-based applications that interact to form an integrated product that powers companies such as Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and News Corporation. The product is internationalized and localized in 7 languages, powers hundreds of client websites, delivers over 100 million page views a month, and generates millions of dollars per year in revenue.
In addition to the role of Chief Software Architect, I've had hiring and management responsibility for the developers, user interface team, systems administrators, and IT. I prefer to spend most of my time developing solutions to the most challenging problems. -
Director of Development
Catalyst Communication
(Internet industry)
2000 — 2000 (less than a year)
Architected, built, and oversaw the development of bikestore.com, the leading bicycling website that included:
- Searchable database of mountain bike trails, with radius
- Meta search that allowed you to search all cycling websites with one search
- Online directory of local bicycle stores
- Architected a B2B solution that was to integrate with major bicycle manufacturers
We had a short time to build and develop the site. We worked very long hours, and with my efforts, we launched the site within two weeks of me being hired. I built a team, and mentored two junior developers, and lead the system/network administration efforts for the company. -
Developer
Brassring
(Internet industry)
1999 — 2000 (1 year)
Started as a junior programmer, and became the lead of the group after 4 months. Key accomplishments include:
- Took over and maintained control of all mission critical technical processes for the brassring.com
- Renovated a manual job posting process into a smooth running automated one that was much more efficient
- Re-factored the entire site, to facilitate a new branding strategy
- The company needed a content management system, and had selected autonomy for the job. I wrote an in house replacement that did what we needed, saving $100,000.
Additional Information
Nick Sullivan’s Websites:
Nick Sullivan’s Interests:
Technology passions include: * Scaling - I love making things go fast, finding out how to distribute load across clusters for availability and performance, and troubleshooting performance problems. I'm looking for a company with performance related challenges. * LAMP environments - I enjoy working with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. And even though it doesn't fit well within the acronym, I've been using Squid and memcached a lot lately too. * Text search - Web searches, job searches, resume searches, text processing, website spidering, text categorization, thesauruses, sentence processing, numeric pattern matching. Yum. * Geographic software - I have experience with geocoding, radius searches, geographic targeting, and the 'Paris' problem.
Nick Sullivan’s Groups:
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On Startups - The Community For Entrepreneurs -
Yahoo! -
Yahoo Employees -
Ad Operations Professionals
