Dietrich Ayala

Experience:

• Mozilla Corporation - http://www.mozilla.com/

  Mountain View, CA, February 2006 - Present, Firefox Engineer
  

• Yahoo!, Inc. - http://www.yahoo.com/

  Santa Monica, CA, March 2005 - February 2006, Technical Yahoo!
  Developed next-generation content presentation platform for the Media group (News, Sports, Health, Music, Finance, etc).

• McAfee, Inc. - http://www.mcafee.com/

  Mission Viejo, CA, 2004 - February 2005, Software Engineer 4
  McAfee purchased Foundstone in the fall of 2004. My responsibilities include ongoing development of the Enterprise Manager product, as well as responsibility for a large group of internal tools, the UI for upcoming products and leading a team of Web developers.

• Foundstone, Inc. - http://www.foundstone.com/

  Mission Viejo, CA, 2002 - 2004, Senior Web Developer
  Lead development of Foundstone's Enterprise Manager, an enterprise risk management portal. Converted this web application to a MVC-based design, and re-wrote the communications architecture to use Web Services (SOAP) and SSL.

• Mediacode, Inc. - http://www.mediacode.com/ http://music.yahoo.com

  Los Angeles, CA, 2002, Contract Developer
  Digital audio management service, started by Ian "the 4th Beastie Boy" Rogers (http://www.fistfulayen.com/) and Rob Lord (http://www.roblord.org/), founding members of Nullsoft, the makers of Winamp. I built the web client for their Muse.net project, using PHP and XML Web service technologies such as SOAP and WSDL. Mediacode has since been purchased by Yahoo, Inc.

• NuSphere Corp. - http://www.nusphere.com/

  Bedford, MA, 2001-2002, Contract Developer
  Implemented SOAP, WSDL and a subset of XML Schema for a web services toolkit, and for web services integration into PHPEd, NuSphere's PHP IDE. Wrote a "wizard" that reads WSDL, and walks the user through the process of implementing SOAP Web services in PHP, and auto-generates the required PHP code.

• GANx4 - http://www.ganx4.com/

  New Orleans, LA, 2000-2002, Web Applications Developer
  Programmed line-of-business software, content management systems. Developed web applications for a wide variety of businesses such as investment brokerage firms, medical conference organizers, booking and management agencies, etc. URLs:

  • Lucky Horse Industries - http://www.luckyhorseindustries.com
  • MedMeetings - http://www.ganx4.com/clients/medmeetings/templates_march3-01/registration/
  • Start Booking - http://www.ganx4.com/clients/start/site/
  • GirlWrites - http://www.girlwrites.com
  • Blanchard Online - http://www.blanchardonline.com
  • Busimarket.com - http://www.busimarket.com

• Saint Publishing - http://www.saintpublishing.com

  Seattle, WA, 2001-2002, Programmer, Data Architect
  Created an XML-based web content management system that allows remote delivery and administration of finance related content to multiple client sites. The system has accounting and project management capabilities.

• Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce - http://www.djc.com

  Seattle, WA, 2001-2001, Contract Programmer
  Created a Web-based business-to-business application that allows private contractors to apply for and manage their membership on the vendor lists and 'small works' rosters of public agencies such as city and county governments. It also provides private contractors the ability to categorize themselves according to the NIGP code structure, and a search interface for public agencies.

• Sub Pop Records - http://www.subpop.com

  Seattle, WA, 1999-2002, Webmaster/Network Engineer/System Administrator
  Designed, developed and deployed:

  • A content management and delivery system for the company website, which involved catalog, roster and tour management data for over 200 bands.
  • A secure intranet for managing website and company data.
  • A custom e-commerce system with real-time credit card transactions.

  Designed and developed enhanced content for CDs
  Designed and developed multimedia 'e-cards'
  Installed, configured and administered workstations and servers in a multi-platform, networked environment
  Purchased software, hardware, and services
  Restructured company internet and telecommunications services for cost and efficiency
  Relocated, installed and configured network and server room when company moved.

Non-Profit Work

I have designed and implemented content management and delivery systems for news, events, sponsors, etc for non-profit groups.

• Seattle, WA 2001 - The Vera Project - http://www.theveraproject.org
• Seattle, WA 2001 - The Service Board - http://www.theserviceboard.org

Certifications / Education

• E-commerce and Database Programming Certification, University of Washington, 2000
• XML Standards & Technologies Certification, University of Washington, 2001

Publications

• NuSphere Technical White Paper - Wrote code and parts of a white paper introducing SOAP to PHP developers, and contrasting it to traditional relational database usage with PHP. PDF available here: http://www.nusphere.com/products/library/webservices_whitep_012502.pdf.
• Wrote a chapter about PHP and Web services technologies for a book from WROX Publishing, called "Open Source Web Services", published in the fall of 2002. A PDF of the chapter is available here: http://dietrich.ganx4.com/nusoap/downloads/7469_Chap08.pdf
• I have also edited book chapters and book proposals for Addison-Wesley and New Riders.

Projects / Research

• Toboggan - http://dietrich.ganx4.com/images/toboggan_screenshot.jpg
  Toboggan is a blogging client for Mozilla Firefox. It resides in the sidebar, and supports the Metaweblog API and the Atom API. Toboggan is currently in development, and has not been released to the public.
• Cosmos
  Cosmos is a newsfeed aggregator for Mozilla Firefox. It merges all your newsfeeds into a single, chronologically-ordered feed, like Planet for your personal feeds. Cosmos is currently in development, and has not been released to the public.
• Foxylicious - http://dietrich.ganx4.com/foxylicious
  This is an extension for Mozilla Firefox, which imports del.icio.us bookmarks into the browser bookmarks. The technologies used are XUL, ECMAScript and various XML technologies: XMLHTTP, XPath, DOM.
• Downcoder Updated - http://dietrich.ganx4.com/downcoder/
  An updated version of previously existing Applescript for transcoding MP3s in iTunes for the Mac to lower bitrates. I updated it to work with larger selections of files, added more error-handling, simplified the UI, and got it working with Panther.
• iCal Publishing Support for PHPiCalendar - http://phpicalendar.net/documentation/index.php?title=Using_publish.ical.php
  I added a Webdav server to PHPiCalendar, a web-based iCal viewer, that allows Apple's iCal calendar to publish calendars to it.
• Del.icio.us PHP Class - http://dietrich.ganx4.com/delicious
  This is a PHP class that wraps the del.icio.us XML API.
• The WhoIsGoingToBePresident? API
  I wrote a SOAP/Rest server for interfacing with the ElectoralVote.com data. In the months prior to the 2004 presidential election, this API received thousands of hits per day.
• Ersatz - http://dietrich.ganx4.com/ersatz/
  This is an experiment in building a browser-based 3-pane news aggregator. It uses the XML and XSLT processing components of the browser to render news feeds. It is built entirely with client-side technologies: DHTML, CSS, ECMAScript, XML and XSLT. Currently only supports Mozilla-based browsers, and RSS <=1.0 feeds.
• NuSOAP - http://dietrich.ganx4.com/nusoap
  There are my implementations of SOAP, WSDL and XML Schema in PHP. The client currently achieves interoperability with many SOAP implementations including Apache, Frontier, and Microsoft toolkits.
• Timex4
  This a client-server time-tracking application, with a Web services communication architecture. The server is a SOAP server written in PHP using NuSOAP, and using MySQL for data storage. The client is written in Visual Basic, and resides in the system tray. It was written with the intention of making time-tracking and billing as easy and intuitive as possible. The emphasis was on making the process of tracking time as effortless as possible, with a minimum of steps. I never released this publicly, but used it myself for my consulting and contract projects.
• XPath/XTree/XSelect - http://www.subpop.com/~dietricha
  These are some PHP utilities for creating, parsing and manipulating xml data. I have also have created partial implementations or subsets of XML:DB, SixDML and XSLT, all in pure PHP.
• Flash E-cards - http://www.subpop.com/scripts/main/multimedia.php?key=type&value=e-card
  This is a series of e-cards designed using Macromedia Flash, and used as marketing tools to promote new releases from Sub Pop bands.

Tools / Technologies