Brian Takita

Consultant, Computer Software

Brian Takita - Full Stack Developer

Brian Takita's Bio:

Brian Takita's Experience:

• Architect/Lead Developer at Milyoni, Inc.

  March 2012 - March 2013

  Leads development of social entertainment platform and contributes to product vision, and strategy. The platform includes video, social marketing, gamification, real time social interaction, interactive engagements tied to video, and integration to studio post-production process. Responsible for building/maintaining the Social Video on Demand and Live Event platform which is used by Warner Brothers, Lions Gate, Paramount Studios, Universal Music Group, Hearst Media, Starz, Ovation TV, Astro, Focus Features, Funimation, Sundance Now, etc. Rescued & wrangled codebase into a proper set of services & apps using Node.js, Backbone.js, Rails, Postgres, Redis, and Heroku. Responsible for architecting the core platform & apps to steward product vision, respond to our customers, and open up new product and business possibilities. Mentor developers to become innovative & multi-faceted problem solvers for the entertainment industry. Champion of flattening communication across the organization and codebase. Also pushed to give the development team greater autonomy and increased influence in product development and prioritization. This enables Milyoni to have greater industry impact by focusing on core objectives, success metrics, and improved execution. Example https://apps.facebook.com/tmillslive/products/1797-episode-1-loud-live

• Senior Software Engineer at TrueCar, Inc.

  August 2010 - February 2012

  Senior member of advanced product team, which introduced new products (user service), integration with major partners (wsj.com car reviews and usaa.com car reviews), and devops (chef to automate ec2 architecture, workstations, and new datacenter servers). Rails 3 Upgrade. YUM packaging for deployment. Lead initiatives to share agile knowledge to the rest of the organization. Led initiatives to integrate services. Worked on new approaches to integrate widgets and apis to external partners, such as USAA and Wall Street Journal Autos.

• Lead Developer at honk.com

  August 2009 - August 2010

  Honk.com is a vehicle review site and embeddable white-label platform used by USAA and Wall Street Journal Autos. It's primary investor was Fox News Corp and was acquired by Truecar. Web front and back end development. Embedded vehicle review platform into partner sites (usaa.com, fox news, myspace). Lead development and partnered in product vision for social car shopping that was key to Honk being acquired. Lead team of developers using agile methodologies. * Developed Honk.com site from the beginning until present * Internal framework development * Implemented javascript client/server event framework (http://github.com/honkster/jelly) * Development process improvements (parallelized tests, efficient data import process, etc) * High Availability deployment and server setup on EC2 * Facebook Connect * Partner Authentication Integration * Chef scripts to automate server and workstation configuration * Rails, Javascript, Mysql, Redis, SASS

• Agile Engineer at Pivotal Labs

  January 2006 - August 2009

  Agile Development in the XP tradition. TDD, Pair Programming, Daily Standup meetings, Retrospectives, and other continual personal and process improvements. Worked with early startups to bootstrap their engineering process and team and develop an initial product. Took a leadership role in common code, practices, adoption of new technology, and open source projects. Projects include: * Honk * Maven Link * KGB.com * Grockit * KDA Research Revelation Project * Real Girls Media * heavy.com * Bringo * CommunityWalk

• Consultant at KGB_ (formerly InfoNXX)

  September 2008 - February 2009

  * Developed fully scripted High Availability and scalable Ruby on Rails deployment (based off of EC2 on Rails) on EC2 * Developed no-downtime deployments and migrations * Load testing and performance enhancements

• Consultant at Grockit

  April 2007 - August 2008

  Developed initial implementations of Real-time collaborative test preparation game. This system had the following properties: * Comet (long polling) for quick game play amongst several players * Developed Evented server architecture for lower latency and higher performance * Client-side MVC framework for keeping the UI in sync with the server state While working for Grockit, I was also heavily involved with the following: * Erector (http://github.com/pivotal/erector), a Ruby Builder and Widget framework for generating HTML * Screw Unit Server, now the JS Test Server (http://github.com/pivotal/js-test-server), for more organized Javascript TDD * Unison (https://github.com/grockit/unison), relational algebra ruby library that supports events

• Consultant at Peer to Patent Project

  2007 - 2007

  Heavy Lifter in launching the Peer to Patent pilot application, which was led by the New York Law School. Peer to Patent is a tool to allow the crowd to review and submit prior art for pending patents.

• IT Analyst at NASPP

  February 2004 - January 2006

  * Sql Server DB Admin * Developed internal CRM with Rails, .NET & MS Access * Website ASP development * Reports for Sales Trends and forecasting * Maintain in house Sharepoint Intranet * Technical Support

• Web Application Developer Intern at Flextronics

  May 2001 - February 2002

  Develop corporate intranet using Microsoft technologies (ASP, Sql Server)

• Consultant / Lead Front End Developer at Rundavoo

  March 2013

  Lead front end development for http://www.rundavoo.com Created a responsive (desktop, tablet, mobile) application that integrated with several APIs via CORS and a proxy server. Api's include Rundavoo api, Facebook, Foursquare, Cloudsponge, Mixpanel. Evolved the business logic to optimize for signups and usage. For a faster user experience kept the codebase light & tight with progressive enhancement. Used the Cloudflare CDN with lots of HTTP caching. Technologies/Techniques used: html5, css3, node.js, browserify, jasmine, functional reactive programming (https://github.com/btakita/backbone-signal), cloudflare Successfully integrated Rundavoo into the following brands: Wyndham Resorts, House of Blues, SBE, Earthbar, Music Loves Fashion, LA Pride

Brian Takita's Education:

• University of the Pacific

  1997 – 2002
  BS

Brian Takita's Interests & Activities: