abhijit@menon-sen.com
http://menon-sen.com
2012–
I contribute in various ways to the development of Postgres, including work on bi-directional replication and other features. I am also one of the support managers, act as a consultant on occasion (especially on HA deployments of Postgres), and am responsible for managing the remote-DBA services offered to our customers.
2010–2012
I automated the slow, error-prone, manual process this brokerage firm used to place bids on the day-ahead energy market. The convenient and efficient workflow I introduced enabled them to expand their customer base and consolidate their leading position in the Indian market. The critical system had zero downtime for the 2+ years during which I was responsible for it. I fixed two minor bugs that led to incorrect bids being placed in the first month of operation, and no others were ever found.
2011
I added support for state-of-health (SoH) notifications to PacketFence, an open source network access control system; administrators can use it to quarantine systems without an up-to-date anti-virus installed, or to ensure that the latest security updates are installed. The code is included in PacketFence 3.0.
2003–2010
Arnt Gulbrandsen and I founded a company to write high-quality open source mail archive software. The program is named Archiveopteryx, and it stores a normalised representation of mail in a PostgreSQL database and provides access to it via IMAP, POP3, and HTTP. (See archiveopteryx.org for more.)
My work ranged from research and development to interacting with users and clients, participating in the IETF standards process, contributing to PostgreSQL development, release engineering, and other aspects of working at a developers-only open source-based startup.
2007–2009
I was in charge of release engineering and deployment, and helped to design the database and the high-availability production architecture. I was responsible for PostgreSQL in production, and was a mentor to half a dozen Python developers.
I also wrote a detailed specification for an end-to-end SMS encryption protocol for mobile apps without IP connectivity. It was based on TLS, adapted to the limitations of the transport (expensive, small, slow packets) and the client (limited computing power, restrictive environment).
I maintained the Anti-Phishing Working Group's members system (2009–2011). I developed a Perl interface to Google's URL parser (Topsy.com, 2010); a Linux-based system for bandwidth management at ISPs (BrainRoots, 2003/2007); the RT 3.0 command-line interface and an RT extension to maintain a customer database (Best Practical, 2002/2003); an Apache module to enforce download and login quotas (Choopa, 2002); and an anti-virus system (using Sophos) which was used by Trolltech to scan thousands of messages per day for some years (2001).
I was technical lead at MercuryTech (2000–2001) and at JobsAhead (1999–2000), where I wrote the résumé matching system that was still in use when the company was acquired by Monster.com in 2004. I was one of the developers of the Lycos Investment Challenge and other stock market simulations by Emerging Markets Inc., wrote large parts of eGurucool's initial service, and developed an online water auction site used by farmers in Australia.
I have been actively involved in free software development since 1997.
I have been contributing bugfixes and features to PostgreSQL for many years, including auditing and diagnostic tools and significant performance improvements.
I have contributed extensively to the Ansible 2.0 release, including complete rewrites of some core components (e.g. the ssh connection plugin).
I am one of the maintainers of the Mojolicious web framework.
I was one of the Perl 5 core maintainers, and was heavily involved in the transition from Perforce to git (both version control systems I have used extensively) in 2008.
See menon-sen.com/src and github.com/amenonsen for more details.
I enjoy writing, and have worked hard to become a better writer.
My Git tutorials (git-website-howto and git-central-repo-howto) are quite widely read, and I was a co-author of RFCs 5034 (POP+SASL, 2007) and 5802 (SCRAM, 2010).
menon-sen.com/txt has links to various things I've written.
Last updated: 2015-10-31