Andrew Gaul

Systems programmer interested in entrepreneurship and technical leadership opportunities in San Francisco. Background includes work in distributed computing, machine learning, storage, and free software.

Experience

• Maximizing paperclips

• Consulted for several clients on Apache jclouds, goofys, and S3Proxy and visited 17 countries across Asia and Europe

• Created a hybrid object store for managing data spanning different clouds and geographies
• Implemented protocol translator comprised of an S3 frontend and an enhanced Apache jclouds backend
• Led outbound efforts including pitching to investors, sourcing customer prospects, and presenting at conferences

• Founding engineer for MagFS 1.0-2.6, a cloud-based network file system which evolved into EMC CloudBoost
• Lead developer of object data storage, SQL metadata storage, deduplication, garbage collection, backups, and snapshots
• Worked with the Apache jclouds community to improve performance and compatibility across 15 different object stores
• Addressed database concurrency, management, and space-efficiency issues and contributed to upstream MySQL projects
• Recruited and mentored engineers, supervised contractors, and interacted with customers, investors, and partners

Storage engineer for SteelFusion 1.0, a virtualized, WAN-optimized iSCSI storage appliance

• Contributed to core indexing structures, transactional persistence and recovery of data, and overall system performance
• Established internal dogfood setup, deployed initial customer installs, and evangelized failure-injection testing

File system engineer for Atlas 1.0, a deduplicating storage appliance which evolved into NetApp AltaVault

• Implemented algorithms for deduplication and data structures for efficient indexing and storage of compressed data
• Improved data segmentation, snapshot, and garbage collection algorithms, increasing performance and space efficiency
• Provided 2-10x speedups via algorithmic improvements, assembly-level optimizations, and implementation tuning

Device framework engineer for SteelHead 3.0-5.0, a network optimization appliance

• Technical lead for Python language bindings and modernizing CLI, supervising one junior engineer and one intern
• Redesigned BDB-based statistics subsystem, improving performance, saving space, and simplifying garbage collection
• Integrated SSL acceleration, Proxy File Service, CIFS cache warming, and encrypted configuration with system services

• Lead engineer for the Tabernus E800 1.0, disk refurbishing hardware designed for high-throughput requalification
• Designed and implemented Disk Purge 1.0-2.0, a bootable Linux CD for securely erasing storage devices

Education

Miscellaneous

• Author of asmlint, Chaos HTTP Proxy, Java httpbin, JDBC lint, Modernizer Maven Plugin, and S3Proxy
• Apache jclouds committer & PMC member (2013 - present), Vice President (2017), and GSoC mentor (2014, 2017)
• Free software contributions: compy, goofys, H2, innodb_ruby, Percona InnoDB tools, s3fs, s3-tests, Thrift, and more
• Received an honorable mention at the 2001 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest