Cargo Collective

I worked at Cargo Collective from from 2009 to 2012.

Cargo is highly regarded in the design and art world as the best service for hosting a website where beauty and quality are at the highest standard. In short, it is an excellent service. To this day Cargo hosts over half a million websites and counting.

I was involved at Cargo Collective from very early on. I first interned with the founders my sophomore year of college (2006) and continued to work for them as the first employee (person #3) full-time immediately after I graduated college in 2009. I was a great fit, because of both my design and my programming abilities.

During my time at Cargo I grew into the role of lead backend engineer and worked on countless projects as the site grew. Below are some of the highlights of my time at Cargo.

• Design and implement a custom MVC framework with ORM that allowed us to transition the existing codebase into a more maintainable system. In the process I designed a PHP-based router that replaced an Apache .htaccess-based router.

• Migrate the site's image hosting from using a Linux and Apache based solution to scalable solution using Rackspace Cloud files.

• Design and implement a queuing system based on Gearman for handling asynchronous and synchronous tasks such as image processing.

• Design and implement a password protection feature for sites which allows users to set an encrypted password for their website.

• Design and implement a comment system that allows users use Cargo Collective as a social network.

• Design and implement Memcached-based caching system for the entire platform. I designed a clever cache breaking mechanism using composable cache keys. At the completion of the project, a site could be served 100% from cache without querying the database.

• Install and integrate a search index (SPHINX) for searching the entire platform as well as filtered search within a user's individual website.

• Help scale the architecture from one server to dozens of servers.