Providing development and operations assistance to large customers in the cloud and infrastructure space.

Most recently, in the last 12 months, I developed data transformation and analysis tools at Oak Ridge National Lab in collaboration with CMS ( Medicare/Medicaid ). The raw data was stored on Hadoop with subprojects utilizing Pig, Hive, MongoDB and Neo4J.

• I developed a wide variety of web based applications, mainly LAMP/LAMR based, for many different clients.
• For a detailed list of all my past projects, see: http://balest.com/resume

I was fortunate to join Akamai Technologies, in 1997, prior to their IPO. As part of the original 100 employees, I was deeply involved in the development and deployment of parts of their core software infrastructure.

• Created fault-tolerant distributed component systems comprising core enterprise infrastructure. The system ran on a global network of over 12,000 servers. C++ and XML were the primary languages used.
• Mentored and led developers in modern design patterns, implementation, debugging, documentation, and testing practices.
• Developed various configuration management, simulation, and testing tools utilizing a variety of technologies.

• Implemented CORBA based systems for clients in the Bioinformatics industry. The project involved design and implementation in Java and C++. The project required detailed knowledge of CORBA core and CORBA-Service specifications.

• Developed distributed multi-user collaboration system with pure Java implementation over Java RMI, used by intelligence analysts.
• Ported a secure e-mail bridge to TrustedSolaris operating system. This was part of adistributed intelligence analysis platform. As technical lead, I received the highest level of commendation based on timely delivery and successful certification testing of this system by the Defense Intelligence Agency.