Tom Drapeau

Current

• Director, Propeller social news at AOL LLC

Past

• Senior Software Engineer at Ask Jeeves, Inc.
• Technical Yahoo at Yahoo

Education

• City University of New York-Herbert H. Lehman College
• Concord Academy

Recommended

5 people have recommended Tom

Connections

129 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• Propeller
• Ask Jeeves / Smiley Central
• Hotjobs

Tom Drapeau’s Summary

Software engineer with expertise in running dedicated development groups. Experience as an engineer in: architecture, high volume site planning, integrations and building applications on schedule and budget. Experience as an engineering manager in: staffing, building a successful team (either in office, remote, or outsourced) and growing from startup to stable mentality without overbearing process.

Tom Drapeau’s Specialties:

Software Architecture, Database Architecture, Software Development, Partner Relations, Integrations, Project Management

Tom Drapeau’s Experience

• Director, Propeller social news

  AOL LLC

  (Public Company; TWX; Internet industry)

  March 2006 — Present (3 years 5 months)

  Acted as general manager and business owner for several facets of the Netscape brand including Propeller.com (originally Netscape.com), a social news site; My.Netscape, a personalized start page; Netscape Navigator, a Mozilla-derived web browser.
  
  As Director I oversaw staff of 15 including engineering, design, and editorial staff members. Managed: “Scout” program, consisting of several dozen paid contributors to Propeller.com; public facing blogs (blog.netscape.com and newsquake.netscape.com); and community forums for member assistance.

• Senior Software Engineer

  Ask Jeeves, Inc.

  (Public Company; ASKJ; Internet industry)

  October 2005 — March 2006 (6 months)

  Created an online poll system for use in the Ask Jeeves “Smiley Central” browser toolbar. Utilized Java Spring, J2SE 5.0, JSP w/JSTL on Tomcat connecting to an Oracle database.
  
  Acted as core contributor on a new portal architecture for Ask Jeeves and a first implementation called Smiley Today! This involved writing a portlet-style framework using Spring, J2SE 5.0, the Velocity API, and simple Java sockets to connect from client farm to server farm. The architecture included JMX management extensions, custom class loaders, independently deployed components and services, and a comprehensive service cache layer.

• Technical Yahoo

  Yahoo

  (Public Company; YHOO; Internet industry)

  2002 — 2005 (3 years)

  Managed and acted as lead developer on several projects for the public facing hotjobs.yahoo.com. The technologies used for these projects included C, C++ and PHP on FreeBSD. Projects included:
  
  -Integration of the proprietary Yahoo search engine technology into the hotjobs site for job searching.
  -Created a scalable co-branding solution for partners of HotJobs.
  -A complete site redesign including a platform upgrade to PHP.
  -Creation of adapters for existing proprietary I/O proxy system.
  -Extensive work with a legacy C/CGI/Pro-C/Oracle platform for several minor upgrades to the HotJobs site.
  
  Participated in a number of research and development projects, including:
  -Application of a similarity thesaurus for matching jobs to resumes.
  -Creation of a job recommendation engine using a combination of behavioral analysis and an affinity engine.
  -Participated in an extended study into a new platform encompassing backoffice systems and a new version of hotjobs.yahoo.com for paid members. Plans for the new platform included using a JBoss application tier and Siebel.
  -Acted as an instructor and administrator in an internal education program.

Tom Drapeau’s Education

• City University of New York-Herbert H. Lehman College

  B.A. , Computer Science , 1997 — 2000

  Departmental Honors, Recipient of Robert Carter Memorial Award

  Activities and Societies:

  Golden Key National Honor Society

• Concord Academy

  H.S. , General , 1989 — 1993

  Activities and Societies:

  Varsity Basketball, Volleyball

Additional Information

Tom Drapeau’s Websites:

• Propeller
• Ask Jeeves / Smiley Central
• Hotjobs

Tom Drapeau’s Groups:

•    Yahoo! alumni

Tom Drapeau’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• consulting offers
• new ventures
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch