Theodore “Ted” Schundler



I enjoy digging into the details of systems to build a deep understanding. My experience ranges from microcontrollers to web apps. I specialize in tactically modernizing inherited systems into streamlined designs that welcome iteration without massive rewrites.

Skills

Languages
Active
Go, Python, Rust, Javascript
Familiar
TypeScript, C, C++, Cython, Bourne Shell
Limited
PHP, XSLT, XPath, Assembly (SX/PIC/x86/MIPS), Lex+Yacc, Scheme, Prolog, & many more
Web
D3, Polymer, LitElement, Redux, Underscore/lodash, jQuery, CSS (SCSS/Sass), SVG, Django, Flask, etc.
Tools
Colab/Jupyter, Chrome Debug, VirtualBox, Jenkins, tcpdump/Wireshark, Kibana, Sentry, New Relic, etc.
Network
HTTP, XML RPC, gRPC/Stubby, PXE, SNMP, SMTP, POP3, VRRP, CARP, DNS, DHCP, NAT, Firewalls (IPFW), NFS, tinc VPN, Wireguard, OpenVPN, IPv4, IPv6, etc.
Administration
Linux, FreeBSD, IRIX, nginx, Apache, svn, git, trac, tinydns, powerdns, postfix, Zabbix, Asterisk, etc.
Data
Protocol Buffers (protobuf), JSON, XML, Spanner, MySQL/Percona, Redis, memcached
Hardware
Admin
Serial Consoles, DRAC, Sonicwall Firewall+VPN, Routers from Juniper, Cisco, Arista, MikroTik, Switches from 3Com, Foundry, Extreme Networks, Linksys, etc.
Design
logic design experience and physical layer RS-232, PMX, RS-485, DMX-512, I2C, SPI, etc.
Security
Public and Symmetric Key Cryptography, Hashes, HMAC, TLS, SSH, analysis for XSS, CSP, CORS, XSRF, remote includes, and SQL-Injection, Automated Vulnerability Scanning (Nessus)

Professional Experience

AS 15169

https://1e100.net

2017-

  • Designed & built a system to smoothly switch which system manages a network device, with built-in validation checks, and safety-critical automatic rollbacks.
  • Built a change-correlation engine for network device configurations, accelerating change review cycles by grouping common patterns.
  • Refactoring device-upgrade tooling to scale-up, achieving 100x performance increase and a 90% reduction in memory usage, while also adding horizontally scaleablity across multiple servers.
  • Enhanced device upgrade tooling to support more types of changes: increasing flexibility, while also actively reducing system complexity and increasing reliability.
  • Consulted on the design of critical safety systems, including on handling concurrent actions while maintaining consistency of safety guarantees.
  • Mentored new teammates through 1:1s, code reviews, document reviews, and collaborative pair-programming.
  • Served as an on-call engineer for critical network infrastructure, rapidly unblocking time-sensitive global deployments.
  • Launched and coordinated "Tech Shorts," an internal technical presentation forum to foster team-wide knowledge sharing. I personally presented deep dives on emerging tools and system architectures.

TrueCar

https://www.truecar.com/

Senior Software Developer 2011-2016

  • Enhanced user experience by designing and implementing a typo tolerance for text-based vehicle search using a client-side keyword dictionary. Also built the back-end and designed APIs for a faceted vehicle selection system with swappable backends. (First powered by sqlite, then Elastic Search)
  • Built an API abstraction library to provide a unified interface to both XML and JSON services, with automatic retries, service health monitoring (don't retry when DB is overloaded), type coercion (i.e. many date formats all treated uniformly), and integrated mocking support (to easily record and reply responses for offline debugging, special case simulation and unit testing).
  • Designed and built a system to handle async API calls in a sequential/proceedural-feeling way, maintaining code readability and decreasing page load times typically 2-3x (up to 20x in a rare case). Collaborated on developing debugging tools to check parallelization.
  • Devised a system of malicious bot (crawler) detection and participtated in an ongoing effort to analyze log data and refine detection parameters. This system helped lessen the impact during critical holiday traffic time, maintaining site reliability when previous outages had cost significant sales.
  • Worked on EC2 instance provisioning and deployment system with Fabric & Chef, supporting rolling deploys coordinated through ELB.
  • Mentored new teammates through answering questions, code reviews and system documentation.

Mitto

Co-Founder, Software Developer 2007-2011 (+ongoing support to ~2015)

  • Implementer and designer of core technology (Online Password Management - SaaS), including secret sharing crypto system
  • Acted as network engineer and server administrator, including configuring automated monitoring to detect any failures and address them, minimizing user impact (if any)
  • Developed tools to simplify clustered server management and deployment as for downtime-less upgrades
  • Optimized PHP code through analysis with kachegrind+xdebug yielding up to 10x speed improvements

WLT Capital

Lead Software Architect 2005-2007

  • Led development team, guiding integration and balancing tasks to developers' fortes
  • Developed an MVC application framework including an ORM to enhance the maintainability of the web-based application and robustness against common security vulnerabilities
  • Implemented an expression system translating code written once into multiple languages, avoiding duplicate code, and enhancing user customizability
  • Developed a plugin for trac to manage task dependencies and improve developer productivity

Santa Clara University

http://www.scu.edu/

Software Developer, Information Technology Dept.: January 2001-2005

  • Assisted tracking improper activities and control of network resources by developing a network authentication and management tool with fault-tolerance through redundancy
  • Improved field support service by developing a web-based call tracking database

Teaching Assistant in Astronomy, Physics Department: Sept 2001-June 2003

  • Assisted in explaining experiments to students and set-up of equipment for the lab

Education

Santa Clara University

  1. Master of Science in Computer Engineering
    December 2004, Specialization in Multimedia Systems, GPA: 3.9

  2. Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
    June 2003, with Honors

Volunteer Work / Personal Projects

Burning Man

2015-present

  • Many ongoing personally illumination projects, involving custom microcontroller firware (C++ and Rust), such as https://epii.info/owl.
  • Volunteer fabricator for art projects like Camera Lucida (2018), The Folly (2019), Paradisium (2022), Doorway to Everying (2023), Interlace (2024), Luciferia (2026).
  • Electrical / Lighting (DMX512) lead for Unbound (2022) and Kalos (2023).

epii.info

http://epii.info/anime/

2005-present

  • Wrote tools to pull EXIF data from images and perform automated scaling & labeling
  • Coded simple database-driven UI for navigating photo collections

Blender Foundation

http://www.blender.org/

2004-2007, 2016

  • Updated the "Images as Planes" add-on for a more streamlined workflow better suitability for visual effects use.
  • Worked on recoding 3D boolean mesh operations to produce significantly cleaner results
  • Extended scons build system to support the FreeBSD OS as a build platform

Dr. Queue

http://www.drqueue.org/

2004-2005

  • Developed patches for and tested builds on FreeBSD & IRIX

Santa Clara University

Personal & Academic Projects: 1999-2003

  • Senior Design Project: A light show controller, processing real-time audio signals to drive the show
    Final Report https://epii.info/senior-design
  • A digital positioning and control system (software and hardware) for the 1882 Clarke refractor telescope at SCU allowing multiple workstations to simultaneously collect data and control the hardware in real time including OpenGL visualization of telescope status
  • Hardware Interface to DJ Software - https://epii.info/vtt
Thanks for Visiting

eπi