Itamar Turner-Trauring

Work Experience

2004 - Present: ITA Software

2009 - Present: Product Analyst

Coordinated between engineering and operations groups. Tracked bugs and tasks. Created architectural design documents and operational hand-offs and wrote documentation.

2007 - 2008: Senior Software Engineer, Airline Reservation System's Schedule Server team

In latter part of period, managed a small group of programmers as tech lead, and worked on overall system design with tech leads of other groups.

Worked as part of team on design and implementation of transactional airline schedule distribution server, receiving schedule inputs from three different sources and distributing them to four other systems. Designed and implemented large parts of the persistence layer, as well as transactionality, replication and high-availability. Developed core business logic and protocol implementations.

2006 - 2007: Software Engineer, Airline Reservation System's Core team

As part of ITA's new airline reservation system, written from the ground up in Common Lisp, designed and oversaw implementation of the access control framework. The framework allows sophisticated and flexible policies based on interactions between user roles, requested actions and arbitrary object properties.

2004 - 2006: Software Engineer, Flight Availability team

Conceived, designed and implemented two independent projects for the operations group: a customizable reliable multicast library with congestion control, written in C++ and Python, and a prototype-based configuration library and language for concisely configuring large numbers of similar but non-identical systems.

Worked as part of team on distributed high-performance server system written in C++, with each server handling tens of thousands requests per second. Coding included development of new features, integration of a new internal network protocol, communications support for external systems, airline-specific proprietary business logic as well as maintenance and bugfixes.

2002 - 2004: Independent Consultant

Designed and implemented a distributed educational system for a government agency in California. Designed database synchronization protocol and algorithm, allowing syncing of data from multiple sites and supporting offline read/write access. Built form generation toolkit, GUI client and a cross-platform installation, network update and deployment software running on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Worked for companies in New York City, San Francisco, France and Netherlands, including:

Instant messaging/email notification system for Technorati.
RFID and wireless networking work, as part of an inventory tracking proof-of-concept by Masters of Branding.
XML<->Word document processing server using XML-RPC and COM for Infrae.
VoIP protocol work (SIP).

2000 - 2002: Chief Technology Architect and Co-Founder, Zoteca

Designed and implemented a content hash-based secure data sharing platform for a small startup. This included client libraries, a server system, and applications built on top of the framework. Author of a patent for Zoteca's technology (see link below).

1999 - 2000: Lead Developer, OneBigTable.com

OneBigTable, a NY-based startup in the areas of food and culture. Using Zope, an object-based web application server, led small team that:

Built a high-level food, nutrition and recipe database, with advanced searching and information mining capabilities, together with a work flow system.
Programmed the company's website, including membership, automated update capabilities and GUI administration tools for Windows and Unix.

1994 - 1999: Programmer, MAXIMA New Media

Programmed a number of multimedia CD-ROM titles, as well as a multimedia informational center for the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Developed back-ends for various database-driven web applications.

Non-profit Experience

Led organization of the Twisted Software Foundation, in association with the Software Freedom Conservancy, to further development of the Twisted networking framework. Worked on TSF's ongoing corporate fund raising effort to help pay for development.

Open Source Development

One of the main developers of Twisted, working the core networking package (TCP, UDP, SSL, and so on). Contributed to SIP, FTP, mDNS (zeroconf aka Rendevezous) and HTTP 1.1 protocol implementations. Worked on GUI integration, threading infrastructure, XML-RPC and SOAP web services support, authorization and authentication framework and the component architecture.

Created a number of projects, including:

Perspective Broker (Twisted's language-independent remote object/RMI protocol) implementation in Java.
Coil, a configuration library.
Fusion, a C++ integration layer for Twisted.

Papers and Presentations

Patent #6662198 for Method and system for asynchronous transmission, backup, distribution of data and file sharing, with Prof. M. Satyanarayanan.

Taught tutorials at Emerging Technologies Conference 2004 and O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2003. Speaker at the PyCon 2005, PyCon 2003 and EuroPython 2002 conferences.

Co-authored Networking For The Rest Of Us, with Glyph Lefkowitz, presented at USENIX03 conference, FREENIX track (PDF).

Author of a series of articles on protocol design for webservices.xml.com as well as articles for xml.com and OnLAMP.

Education

Harvard University Extension School: Bachelor of Liberal Arts
Area of concentration was humanities, graduated in 2009. Winner of Reginald H. Phelps Prize, 3rd place, for third highest GPA in graduating class.

Tel-Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University: Computer Science and Mathematics coursework
Approximately 80 credits (out of 120 required for BS degree), 1996-2000.

Personal Details

US Citizen. Living in Cambridge, MA. Formerly known as Itamar Shtull-Trauring.