Lee Azzarello

Systems Architect. Computer Hacker.

lee@rockingtiger.com
+1 3467538508

Abstract

I design, develop and manage scalable interactive software and hardware systems on and off the web. I
build, manage and optimize large scale relational databases. I am invested in Free Software. I am an
amateur scientist. I enjoy art and music.

Experience

drop.io, Simple Private Sharing http://drop.io

Systems Architect and Database Administrator from 2007 until 2010

I was part of the core team that built the production web application for drop.io. As the 4th employee, I
was tasked with designing and developing a scalable cloud architecture for an agile startup built on
Ruby on Rails and backed by PostgreSQL. Before the company was acquired by Facebook in 2010, I
led a team of three and scaled the system to over 100 server instances in three environments. EC2, S3,
Rails, Chef, Nagios, Munin, Jmeter, Bundler, Debian and a lot more.

Gawker Media
Linux Systems Administrator from 2005 until 2007

I was one of two sysadmins at Gawker during the company's rise to prominence as the online standard
for topic based lifestyle publications. Before cloud computing existed, I did ground work in the data
center, racking servers and building them out with a custom Apache build and a very active MySQL
cluster. I also managed a switched network across two racks with a 100mbit pipe to The Internet. The
Gawker publishing engine scaled to hundreds of writers and millions of readers across a handful of
properties including Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker. LAMP + Java with some mod_perl thrown in.

Voice Dynamix
Senior Network Architect from 2004 until 2006

Voice Dynamix was a startup company that provided voice over IP services to small businesses in New
York and New Jersey. I was on a team of two that was tasked with building a prototype of a production
VoIP network speaking the SIP protocol and powered by Asterisk and OpenSER. The prototype was a
success and the company began to build a client portfolio with a number of early adopters. Debian
GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, Cisco, SIP, Asterisk, OpenSER, TCP/IP routing, PSTN bridging, PRI,
FXS/FXO, Origination/Termination.

Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org

Online Media Specialist from 2002 until 2004

Democracy Now! is a daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez,
airing on over 850 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the U.S. The
company did all their own distribution from the studio in lower Manhattan. I arrived as a digital audio
specialist with some web programming skills. I ended up developing and managing an online,
automated A/V encoding and distribution system with open hardware and free software. I worked
closely with archive.org to make the Democracy Now! archives available only a few hours following
the live broadcast. I also worked with their LAMP stack for the daily news website. Ecasound, Perl,
Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, XML-RPC, Ices, Icecast.

Art Resources and Technology

Interactive Multimedia Programmer from 2000 until 2002

ART was the company behind the art of Uri Dothan, an Israeli multimedia artist working out of New
York. I managed his studio and developed software tools used in the production of video art, sound art,
photography and web art projects. The work he produced was exhibited in Israel, Austria, New York
and California. We worked with cutting edge technologies like Max/MSP, Supercollider, SoftVNS and
Autodesk Maya.

New York Indymedia http://nyc.indymedia.org/

Broadcast Systems Hacker from 2000 until 2004

I cut my teeth with Linux and web publishing by volunteering with a grassroots independent news
collective called Indymedia. Back when the word “blog” would elicit confused and perhaps incredulous
reactions, Indymedia had already built a global network of web applications that allowed open
publishing with access for all. The new york office was donated by Emmanuel Goldstein, the publisher
of the classic hacker publication 2600 magazine. In midtown Manhattan, a collective of Linux hackers
came together to manage a web application that provided a crucial public service to new york and the
world. My exit with Indymedia was on a good note; after the 2004 Republican National Convention in
New York. I built and managed a tactical radio station to cover citizen protests in NYC. We were
sourced by all local and national mainstream media like The New York Times, The New York Daily
News and CNN as the “voice of the people”. We scooped them all. It was rad.

Skills

● Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Linux, Gentoo Linux

● PostgreSQL administration and performance optimization
● Cloud Computing in Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud
● TCP/IP Networking with Linux, iptables and OpenBSD
● Systems Automation with Chef
● Monitoring with Nagios
● Metrics with Munin and RRDtool
● Ruby on Rails
● Git
● Agile Software Development
● Extreme Programming
● DevOps
● MongoDB/CouchDB/Riak and NoSQL friends
● ffmpeg and open source digital media encoding
● Cisco IOS
● Microsoft Windows and Cygwin

Languages
SQL, Bash, Ruby, Perl, C, JavaScript, HTML, XML, CSS, JSON, Java, Erlang

Open Source Contributions

Debian GNU/Linux: Debian Developer sponsorship in progress

Chef: Infrastructure Automation Framework
Oscurrency: timebanking web application
Tornom: bittorrent in the cloud
Arduino EMG Interface: A bridge between an Arduino and an Electromyograph.

Extra Curricular

Human Computer Interfaces

Digital Audio Synthesis
Embedded hardware sensors
3D Graphics
The politics and applications of Free Software
Musical Instrument design
Computer Science
Logic and Linguistics

Education

BA, Antioch College Class of 2000

MIT Open Courseware Computer Science department. Ongoing, as I like learning new stuff.