Donald robertson - curriculum vitae

Experience

Oct. 2022 - Present

Led migration of internal tooling from multiple CLIs to a single ReactJS web UI. Overhauled a dormant project with dependency upgrades. Added OpenTelemetry-based observability surfaced using Grafana. Co-authored an internal RFC proposing architectural simplifications and efficiency gains for related upstream services.
Subsequently selected to lead UI development on a new business-critical product. Responsible for project setup, technology choices, documentation, system architecture, operational ownership and feature delivery.
Drove process improvements that increased team velocity through a reduction in non-essential meetings and adoption of asynchronous pre-refinement activities. Defined a collaborative process with product and design to identify and resolve technical unknowns before they could block delivery.
Mentored multiple engineers in front-end development to reduce development bottlenecks and minimise knowledge siloing.

May 2016 - Sep. 2022

Part-Time:
Oct 2018 - Sep 2022

Helped drive the migration of user account data and functionality from an ASP.NET/MS-SQL monolith to an Elixir/PostgreSQL microservice with zero downtime and 6 weeks ahead of schedule
Designed, implemented and optimised a novel family tree layout algorithm in NodeJS supporting performant layout of 10,000 node trees in ancestral and descendant directions simultaneously thereby outperforming competing products. The algorithm underpins the ReactJS family-tree application within the wider family history product.
Investigated network performance at the container, node and VM layers of an on-premises Kubernetes cluster using eBPF and perf resulting in issues with DNS caching being identified while affirming normal patterns of
```
softirq
```
processing following a NIC upgrade

Jun. 2020 - Sep. 2020

Internship

Researched improvements to low-latency live-streaming performance by enabling communication of server-side transport state via a novel HTTP header to a client-side dash.js video player
Deployed an OpenResty server as a transparent proxy that generates and prepends the header to responses from an upstream CDN server
Implemented a throughput estimator in dash.js to parse the contents of the HTTP header and estimate throughput based on the congestion window, MSS and RTT
Documented the project results in an internally published report. The approach was refined and expanded to support QUIC in the course of my PhD.

Feb. 2016 - Apr. 2016

Co-led integration of PayPal into an ASP.NET/MS-SQL e-commerce platform used by multiple SME clients across Scotland

Jul. 2015 - Jan. 2016

Sep. 2018 - Sep. 2024

Supervisors: Marwan Fayed (Primary), Saleem Bhatti (Secondary)

Thesis: Collaborative Feedback Controls for Transport and Application Layers in Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)

Conducted a statistical analysis of data transfer during slow-start to avoid issues due to nesting the congestion avoidance and ABR algorithm control loops
Implemented a system allowing a modified dash.js player to enable pacing at the server-side using a a combination of: 1) an HTTP server implemented in Rust, 2) a custom congestion control module with Reno AIMD, and 3) a modified Linux kernel
Explored using server-side transport-state to improve low-latency live-streaming performance in a dash.js player modified to handle TCP or QUIC metrics
Deployed a patched version of Nginx with QUIC support provided by Quiche to enable surfacing of transport-state without the use of OpenResty or Lua

Brendan Murphy Memorial Prize, 2019: Awarded for the best presentation by a young researcher at the Next Generation Networks Multi-Service Networks workshop

Sep. 2011 - Jun. 2016

First Class (Honours)

Dissertation: Development of a Linux Driver for the Microsoft Xbox 360 Wired Controller

Implemented a Linux kernel USB device driver for the Microsoft Xbox 360 Wired game controller including support for LED and vibration features
Conducted a statistical analysis of performance against extant solutions using number of clock cycles to avoid issues with time-based measurement of kernel-space driver software

Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Elixir, Python, SQL (PostgreSQL), HTML, CSS, C
Libraries: JavaScript

NodeJS

React

Next.js

Tanstack Query

Prisma

Jest

Playwright

Rust

Actix

Tokio

Hyper

Log

LazyStatic

Tracing

Serde

Python

Jupyter

Matplotlib

NumPy

SciPy
Tooling: Nginx, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AlertManager, Grafana, Ansible, Vault, GitHub Actions

Football: I have been a devotee of football since childhood. I am a diehard fan and former season ticket holder of Leicester City. Sadly I am now reduced to following them from afar. I delight in learning more of the global history of the game. Most recently I have been reading about the evolution of Argentinian football across the twentieth century.
Programming: Writing code has been my main hobby since beginning my undergraduate degree. I enjoy problem solving and the structure programming brings to that pursuit. I was treasurer and then president of Stirling University Computer Club. In second year I led development of an on-campus route finder for Android. I now work primarily in TypeScript. I enjoy the safety provided by type annotations when trying to ensure program correctness.