Murat Ayfer • Resume

Introduction

I'm in the fourth year of my undergraduate study in Computer Engineering (software option) at UBC, although currently I'm on the exchange program in Uppsala, Sweden. I have more experience with Linux than any other OS.

I am a supporter of open source software. I have been using Linux for all of my computational needs for the past five years. I have tried many distributions, and consider Ubuntu to be my favorite due to its superior online documentation and repositories.

The first program I wrote was a calculator written in Visual Basic, in sixth grade.
The first useful program I wrote installed persistent live Ubuntu onto USB flash disks. (This was before there were GUI installers) Credit goes to fdisk and Ubuntu, not me.
I am familiar with terms like "Slashdot effect" or "Godwin's Law", I follow xkcd and I absolutely love reddit.
I google things and I figure them out.
I don't think I could live without ssh.

Skills

Learned in school:
- C, C++, Java, VHDL, MatLab, 8051 & 8086 Assembly
Learned on my own:
- Unix, PHP, JSP, Perl, Ruby, Python, Regular expressions, SQL, Bash scripting
- Use of the MVC design pattern (I prefer CodeIgniter as my PHP framework)
- Cross-browser, W3C compliant, tableless web design using XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS, Javascript (AJAX with jQuery)
- Cross-platform GUI applications with Python and wxWidgets (wxPython)
- Relational database design
- Search engine optimization (e.g. Apache mod_rewrite)
- Setting up and configuring Linux desktops and servers (e.g. configuring Apache, Tomcat, PHP, MySQL, SSH, Subversion, Postfix, ISPConfig, rsync, crontab, iptables, monitoring tools, etc.)
- Virtualization software (VMWare and VirtualBox)
- Amazon EC2 and S3 for web hosting and backup purposes

Experience

Websites (both design & development):
- lupusride.com - A site aimed towards raising money for lupus research
  - Integrated with Paypal - The donors list gets updated automatically when a payment is received.
- fbww.org - A multi-language blog/news site for a Turkish soccer team
  - Multi-language database design
  - Has a web interface admin panel
  - Integrated with phpBB 3
- ubcbook.com - Book exchange website for UBC
  - Automatically fetches course and textbook information from the UBC Bookstore website. (thanks to Perl's LWP and regex)
  - Page layout relative to text size (try changing the text size)
Linux Sys Admin and Web Developer - Invoke Media
2008 Summer
- Set up a web server on Amazon EC2 and set up daily backups to Amazon S3
- General Linux system administration (install and configure programs and services, SSL certificates, resolve performance and bottleneck issues, etc)
- Web development using PHP and jQuery for Ajax (used Drupal for some sites), and a little bit of HTML/CSS work
Computer specialist - Bilkent University Computational Electromagnetics Research Center (BiLCEM)
2007 Summer
BiLCEM recently broke the world record for the largest differential equation solved (85 million unknowns)
- Maintaned a high-performance HP Cluster (installing hardware & software, running diagnostic tests etc)
- Set up Linux servers (one firewall/gateway, and a test cluster running the Rocks distribution)
- Intranet for the employees:
  - Wrote a register/login/admin/permissions system using PHP and MySQL
  - Created a content-management system consisting of reserve servers, forum, news, photo album, web file managers and more
  - Designed the interface using XHTML, CSS and Javascript
- Other:
  - Installed and set up Ubuntu on several desktop computers, and helped employees get used to linux
  - Helped the system admins with disk failures, network problems etc.

Currently working on

Building a convenient web interface for a company's large database using features such as Ajax validation, autocomplete etc.
A cross-platform Python (wxPython for the GUI) program that scans the user's music library, and generates playlists according to the user's preferences by looking up statistics on Last.fm. (I also wrote an Amarok plugin in Ruby that does the same thing.)
Grab an early working version here: iTunes playlist generator (Windows only, and excuse the file size)