Phil Oertel

PHIL OERTEL

Jul 2010 - present: Google, Inc. (Mountain View, CA)

Built PHP web applications with Filemaker, MySQL, and PostgreSQL backends, usually on short timelines and constrained budgets.
Handled all aspects of web software development, deployment, maintenance, bug fixing, testing, and performance optimization for a wide variety of clients, both small and large.
Promoted best practices to less experienced developers, including source control (subversion), OO design and MVC architecture, and automated testing (Selenium and PHPUnit).

Oct 2008 - Jun 2010: Soliant Consulting (Chicago)

Soliant provides custom web and database development specializing in FileMaker, PHP, and Flex.

Built PHP web applications with Filemaker, MySQL, and PostgreSQL backends, usually on short timelines and constrained budgets.
Handled all aspects of web software development, deployment, maintenance, bug fixing, testing, and performance optimization for a wide variety of clients, both small and large.
Promoted best practices to less experienced developers, including source control (subversion), OO design and MVC architecture, and automated testing (Selenium and PHPUnit).

Dec 2009 - May 2010: Freelance Web Developer

Modified, repaired, and extended PHP-based sites for a diverse mix of Chicago-area businesses.
Rebuilt the site of a popular Chicago entertainment writer. Built an admin interface using Joomla with custom components. Added a mobile site to find reviews using a Yelp-like interface, including cross-platform geolocation-based search using Javascript.

Nov 2006 - Oct 2008: Independent travel in Latin America

Jul 2005 – Nov 2006: Amazon.com (Seattle)

Maintained and extended Java and C++ services for collecting and reporting feedback on third-party merchants. Operated a highly-available (2-second SLA), distributed (backed by ~30 hosts) HTTP service. Served several hundred thousand requests a day, mostly from the retail website.
Created international versions of the feedback clients and feedback management pages used by sellercentral.amazon.com for its European launch.
Loaded feedback - around 100 million records - into a data warehouse, and set up and managed crons to update the data daily. Created web-based tools to access the new warehoused data.
Managed an on-call rotation for 25 engineers in the merchant quality group.

Languages: PHP 5.3, C++, Java 5, Javascript, Perl, SQL

Frameworks: Joomla, Zend Framework 1.9, PHPUnit, JQuery, Smarty, Doctrine ORM

Environments: UNIX CLI and Emacs, LAMP stack (RHEL 3/Debian, MySQL/Oracle 9/PostgreSQL, Perl/PHP/Python), XDebug, Eclipse

Motivated by my own need to build web applications using a FileMaker backend for my clients at Soliant, I developed a plugin that turns FileMaker Pro into a full-fledged SQL server. It is the first ever plugin to make data in FileMaker Pro (normally used as a desktop productivity app) available to external programs like PHP web applications. Written in C++, it uses native OS sockets, threading, and concurrency primitives to achieve a lightweight server that dramatically outperforms FileMaker Server’s own Web Publishing Engine.
Wrote an extension that allows FileMaker developers to embed Javascript code inside their scripts. The inspiration for this has been the success and broad utility of SmartPill for extending FileMaker scripts with PHP.

MS in Computer Science: University of Illinois, 2003-2005

Thesis: A Commonsense Knowledge Retrieval System, published in the 7th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning

Modules included: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Text Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining

BS in Computer Science: Southern Illinois University, 1999-2003

Modules included: Computer Graphics (an OpenGL course), Software Engineering, Database Systems

Received Outstanding Senior Award, given annually to the Computer Science department's top graduating senior.