Dave Beckett — Resume
- Location
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Email
- dave@dajobe.org
- Nationality
- British. Hold a US Permanent Resident "Green Card".
- Year of Birth
- 1969
- Telephone
- Google Voice: 650-450-8421 (will call screen)
- Sites
- Home page: www.dajobe.org
- Blog: journal.dajobe.org
- Software: github.com/dajobe
- Digital resumes
- Stack Overflow
- www.linkedin.com/in/dajobe
Interests and Experience
- Web: technologies, software design and architecture
- Data and metadata: Semantic Web and RDF, relational (SQL), semi-structured, real time/low latency, distributed
- Open: standards, Open Source / Free Software development, open data
Key Skills
- Software development
- Analysis, design and architecture for large-scale software systems
- Strong skills in technical leadership, training, mentoring and communicating
- Coding considering long-term portability, packaging, maintenance and support
- Technical writing, documentation and presentations
- Languages: C, Perl, automake, autoconf, shell, flex and bison (expert 10+ years);
Python, PHP, Hive SQL, MySQL, occam (experienced);
Java, Ruby (known)
- Expert on Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Semantic Web Technology
- Expert on XML, XML Namespaces, XML Infoset and web architecture
- Extensive experience with Web concepts, architecture and technologies
- Experience with geo and local search technologies and business.
- Experience with social networking techologies and products.
- Free Software / Open Source
- Licensing, collaboration, community, policy issues.
- Participant in Debian and PNG projects
- Founder of Redland RDF, Flickcurl Flickr API projects
- Standards development activity: W3C, RDF and Dublin Core
- Co-author of 1 W3C Candidate Recommendation on Turtle with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Eric Prud'hommeaux and Gavin Carothers (Feb 2013)
- Editor of 3 W3C RDF Recommendations, 1 Dublin Core Recommendation
- Member of W3C RDF Data Access Working Group (2004-2005)
- Member of W3C RDF Core Working Group (2001-2004)
- W3C representative for the University of Bristol (2002-2005) and University of Kent (2000)
- Member of Dublin Core Advisory Board
- Portable Network Graphics (PNG) (1995-) and the first browser implementation of it
- Systems
- Operation of Linux (RedHat, Debian / Ubuntu, Gentoo), OSX
- Also worked with Unix (Solaris, IRIX) and FreeBSD
- Linux/Unix systems administration and network administration.
- Software, Community and Professional roles
- Program committee member for O'Reilly Strata conference on big data (2011-)
- W3C Semantic Web Interest Group (2000-)
- Debian Project Developer (2005-)
- Co-founded planetrdf.com (2004-)
- Co-runs W3C Semantic Web Interest Group IRC logs and community scratchpad (2000-)
Professional Experience
- July 2012 — Present: Zite Inc, San Francisco, California, USA
- Technical Architect
- Coding in Python working on news content recommendation systems
and personalization projects spanning Zite and parent company CNN.
Technical lead on CNN Trends
working in CNN production environment. Technical lead of Zite
infrastructure project. Member of Zite management team working on
project planning and execution.
- September 2010 — May 2012: Digg Inc, San Francisco, California, USA
- Lead Software Engineer (September 2010-May 2012)
- Coding with Python, PHP and a little JavaScript. Working with
Cassandra, Redis, Memcached, Hive, Hadoop Map-Reduce and Tornado.
Developed with Gerrit code review and GIT with continuous integration
via Hudson. Engineering infrastructure design and architecture.
Documented existing systems design and synthesized architecture.
Lead on tracking and analytics stack supporting business metrics and
analysis needs. Mobile device and mobile web lead fixing Digg main
and mobile sites on touch and small screen devices. Lead on public
web API supporting IOS app, dealing with client and server OAuth and
developing new APIs. Doing whatever it takes to get the job done.
- October 2005 — August 2010: Yahoo! Inc, Sunnyvale, California, USA
- Principal Software Architect (Jan 2010 — Aug 2010)
- Social media technology domain architect for Yahoo! Media
property group: News, Sports, Finance, Entertainment globally.
Providing technical leadership over multiple projects
in the social media area, looking at integration with Facebook,
Twitter and other networks, social engagement technology such as
blogging and commenting, polls, ratings, reviews.
Designing integrations and developing social technology
strategy working with product, business and technology leadership.
Mentoring and training other technical contributors.
- Senior Software Architect (Feb 2009 — Jan 2010)
- Technical leadership over multiple projects and Technical Leads
using Web, Storage and Serving technologies at large scale.
Designing major projects from scratch with global reach,
scaling as needed, with best of breed storage and search technology.
Architect of Yahoo! Local
serving local event and business listings integrated with maps
and geo/local search.
- Software Architect (Jul 2007 — Feb 2009)
- Technical leadership over multiple projects and Technical Leads
using Web, Database, XML, Semantic/Natural Language and Semantic Web and other novel technologies.
Designing software architectures, large scale deployments and developing
the long term technical plans and visions. Participating in
company-wide leading-edge technological developments and plans.
- Principal/Senior Software Engineer (Oct 2005-Jul 2007)
- Technical lead on projects using Web and Semantic Web technologies.
Designing web APIs and implementing them in PHP and C. Moved
RDF via the Redland libraries into a key
technology for managing Yahoo! content and metadata.
- 2000 — October 2005: University of Bristol, UK
- Senior Technical Researcher, technical leader, IEMSR Project (Aug 2004-Oct 2005)
- Management and administration: responsibilities including project technical direction, project team management, co-leading ILRT Web Futures Group including bidding for funding.
- Worked on the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group developing the SPARQL RDF query language (2004-).
- Java development with Eclipse, SWT and JFace.
- Senior Technical Researcher, SWAD Europe (Dec 2002-Oct 2004)
- Ran development, outreach and workshops for SWAD Europe
- Designed and developed the portable Redland RDF API, Raptor RDF parser and Rasqal RDF query libraries
- Worked on the W3C RDF Core Working Group (WG) editing two W3C Recommendations
- Participated in many RDF developer communities and activities
- Built Web Search Environments (WSE) novel web crawling/metadata system
- 1998 — 2000: University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
- Research Fellow
- UK Mirror Service (UKMS): designed, implemented and operated.
- Created the UKMS metadata, search, web mirroring and logging systems.
- Extensive Linux and Solaris administration.
- Created the premier online RDF Resource Guide (1998-present)
- Operated and maintained the database-driven department web site.
- 1990 — 1998: University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
- Computing Officer
- Parallel computing with INMOS Tranputers, Meiko, occam language
- Support Parallel Computing/HPC service center for south east UK
- Created and operated the Internet Parallel Computing Archive (IPCA) (1993-1998).
- Participated in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (1995-)
Education
- 1987-1990, University of Bristol
- BSc (Hons) Degree in Computer Science
Selected publications
- SPARQL Query Results XML Format, Sandro Hawke (second edition editor), Dave Beckett and Jeen Broekstra (editors), W3C Recommendation, 21 March 2013.
- Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language, W3C Candidate Recommendation. Edited by Eric Prud'hommeaux and Gavin Carothers. Co-authored with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Eric Prud'hommeaux and Gavin Carothers, 19 February 2013
- Semantics Through the Tag paper (slides) presented at XTech 2006, Amsterdam 19 May 2006.
- RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised), Dave Beckett (editor), W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004
- RDF Test Cases, Jan Grant and Dave Beckett (editors), W3C Recommendation, 10 February 2004
- SWAD Europe deliverable report on Workshop on Semantic Web Storage and Retrieval, held 13-14 November 2003 at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. 12 January 2004
Selected presentations and events
- Screencast video: Command Line Semantic Web with Redland presented at the Semantic Web Austin Meetup during SXSW, 15 March 2010.
- Open Source Semantic Web, Semantic Technoogy Conference 2009 open source Code Camp, 14 June 2009.
- Invited keynote panel speaker, Semantic Technology Conference, San Jose, May 2007
- Redland, Raptor and Rasqal - Open Source RDF in C, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, Java and C#, invited talk at XMLOpen, Cambridge, 21-23 September 2004
- Invited participant to speak on the semantic web at the Rueschlikon conference on information policy in the New Economy, organised by the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, sponsored by The Rueschlikon Centre for Global Dialogue, Switzerland, 19-21 June 2003
- Semantic Web Technologies for UK HE and FE Institutions (session details), Invited lecture given at Institutional Web Management Workshop 2003, University of Kent, Canterbury, 12 June 2003
- Semantic Web Today, invited lecture in Electronic Commerce and New Media series, Department of Information Systems, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria, 21 May 2001.