Danger

2002 - 2008

I led Danger’s four-person E-mail Service team, responsible for the cloud backend of Danger’s smartphone, the Hiptop, a.k.a. the T-Mobile Sidekick, the first consumer smartphone.

For the first three years I was the only person on the team and had sole responsibility for Danger’s mail systems, which mediated transactions and data between the Hiptop, an IMAP/SMTP backend, numerous third-party POP and IMAP servers, and a web-based mail UI.

Designed and implemented a scalable, user-customizable spam filter; rolled my own SMTP and IMAP clients to achieve a 100x speedup over the off-the-shelf solutions; created a distributed production-logfile analyzer; and very much more.

The custom IMAP client, which achieved its performance via the use of cooperative multitasking and non-blocking I/O, is preserved in this GitHub repo.

Technologies

Perl, IMAP, SMTP, POP, Oracle, Java, MMS, spam filtering.

Patents

Filtering electronic messages, June 2006

Caching email messages within a wireless data service, April 2007

Synchronizing email messages between external and local email servers and/or a wireless device, April 2007

Career