Elora Burns — Software Developer
Summary
Experienced in Elixir and Python web services, systems-level C, relational databases, relational databases, concurrent
systems, refactoring, Linux, OS X, git, and Oxford commas. I also sing a cappella with my band Countermeasure, and knit continental.
Projects
As a favour to a friend, I built this “microsite” for them to chronicle their journey through the
Shikoku Pilgrimage. Site constructed from scratch
using Leaflet and a custom static-site generator in Python. I also created an iOS shortcut to make uploading images trivial
from the Photos app. Uploaded images are time and geotagged and inserted at the appropriate place in the walking path as
rendered on the map. Comment threads integrated via Disqus. Hosted on a Digital Ocean Droplet.
Cats can't wear masks, so how do you keep them safe on international flights? By pumping HEPA-filtered air into the
carrier! Designed custom 3-d printed parts to attach Honeywell HEPA filters to a set of computer case fans, providing
600L/m of clean air. Runs for 11h off of a 99Wh USB battery (the largest standard ones, allowed on plane flights). USB 5V
power is boosted to 12V for the fans via an inexpensive dongle. Also provided minor modifications to the cat carrier to
attach the filter. Have a look at the pictures!
Vocal Keys (github)
A custom art project that lets a musician “play” a choir using a MIDI keyboard. Implemented as a 23-piece choir all
wearing headphones playing a different semitone, each having an indicator light. The player uses a MIDI keyboard connected
to a Raspberry Pi and for each key you hold, the light for the singer of that pitch lights up, so they know to sing.
Custom-built MIDI to LED integration, PCBs for light and sound distribution, and embedded ATTiny85 system for producing
all the semitones.
Website maintainer through 3+ hosting providers, including self-hosted.
VGArduino
Convinced an Arduino Leonardo to drive an arcade VGA monitor, playing pong. Code on github, pictures on flickr.
Career History
Senior/Staff Software Developer from 2014-2024.
- Manager feedback:
I continue to be impressed with Elora’s near flawless technical execution. I literally cannot
think of a project they’ve been involved with that didn’t get delivered with high quality, long-term thinking in mind,
and excellent results. I have 100% confidence when Elora is involved in a project that it will be architected and built
to be technically solid.
- Ported the Notification Scheduler from Nomad to Kubernetes with no downtime, despite the app using Nomad-specific
features for concurrency control.
- Implemented a PID control system to apply dynamic throttling (rate limiting) to incoming traffic to prevent system
abuse (intentional or accidental) with minimal impact to unrelated customers.
- Led two (of many) teams in expanding PagerDuty’s offering into the EU, with automatic routing of misdirected traffic.
Work was organized to reduce the critical path for other teams while still delivering our work on-time.
- Ideated the entire project and led one of the milestones for a replacement Notification Scheduler. Determined high-level requirements
and led the team in building an massively parallel asynchronous application in Elixir (first of its kind at the company).
The new service could handle 10x the traffic with 1/10th the infrastructure.
- Team lead for extracting a multi-terabyte table from the app’s monolithic database, with no downtime.
- Responsible for the “BarberDuty” barbershop quartet and “On Call, Take the Fall” alert sounds in the mobile app.
- Overhauled user-facing reporting, increasing speed by 10x.
Software Developer (aka Defect Poacher and Futurist) from 2013-2014.
- Worked on the Loyalty Commerce Platform (LCP) team, building a new JSON REST API to
access Points' broad selection of loyalty partners.
- The LCP is developed with Python, Flask, CouchDB (with JavaScript views), NGINX, Apache httpd, mod_wsgi, and haproxy.
It is implemented using a microservice architecture.
- Implemented methods for doing schema migrations to data in CouchDB, and ways to avoid downtime due to view
re-indexing.
Software Developer (aka Defect Poacher and Futurist) from 2008-2013.
- Co-architected and built a greenfield, agile project to produce an event-based web service
using Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, and MySQL.
The project delivered on its goals on-time over 8 months (business details are confidential).
- Orchestrated and implemented massive database schema migrations over the course of 10 months involving millions of
tables with zero downtime and no data loss. Using the database as intended drastically improved performance and reduced
hardware costs.
- Converted all customer textual data from Windows-1252 plus HTML entities into UTF-8 with no downtime. Data
translation issues were detected early and corrected. Using UTF-8 eliminated workarounds for API consumers and surprises
for users.
- Worked on the Evolve team to improve reliability, performance, and functionality of our internal Python web service
which provides One True Way to access customer data.
Software Developer from 2003-2007.
Co-op student Software Developer for 8 months in 2002.
- Updated testcases, identified bugs, and completed a performance project for DB2 working in the Backup and Restore
team.
Precise Software Technologies
Co-op student Software Developer for 8 months in 2001.
- Worked on an embedded real-time operating system (MQX), particularly
device-side USB and Bluetooth.
- PyCon US 2014 organizer
- "Memories Officer", took many
photos, and encouraged others to contribute to the same flickr group.
- Since photo taking is largely not time-sensitive, did random gophering and idea-bouncing support on-site.
- PyCon Canada 2013 organizer
- PyCon Canada 2012 organizer
- Volunteered on the A/V team at PyOhio 2012, recording talk videos and doing live editing.
- I've presented at PyCon US, PyCon Canada, and PyOhio. Presentations include:
- "Evolving an internal web service" at PyOhio 2011
- "What you need to know about datetimes" at PyCon US 2012
- "Server log analysis with pandas" at PyCon US 2013
- A number of technical blog posts at previous employers, most of them evaporated from the internet.
- Contributions to a variety of open-source projects, including:
-
Symposion, a Django project for conference websites including
PyCon US, PyCon Canada, and other PyCons around the world. Provided workflow improvements.
-
SQLAlchemy, the leading ORM in Python. Fixed memory leaks in C extensions,
MySQL schema reflection bugs, and Python 3 porting.
-
XDebug, 3rd party debugging module for PHP. Contributed performance enhancements
to code coverage feature, improving speed by over 30%.
-
PyPy, a toolchain for implementing bytecode interpreters and an implementation of
Python in Python. Wrote some NumPyPy "ufuncs" (e.g.
sin, log2) in RPython.
Education
- BSc Computer Engineering from the University of Alberta (1998-2003), Co-operative Program
Other Interests
- Music: singing, listening, arranging, composing. Member of Countermeasure since September 2014.
- Outdoor activities, such as walking, biking, rock climbing, and sailing.
- Cooking, baking, knitting, sewing, DIY, “maker” things.
- Intrigued by LISP, Erlang, and Clojure.
Buzzword Bingo
C, Cassandra, Chef, ClearCase, CVS, DataDog, Elixir, embedded systems, Flask, git, HTML, HTTP, HTTPS, internet,
JavaScript, JSON, Kafka, Kubernetes, Linux, Mercurial, Nomad, PHP, Pylons, Pyramid, Python, redmine, reStrutured Text,
Ruby, Scala, SPDY, Splunk, Sumologic, SVN, trac, virtual memory, web, web service, XML.
If you’ve read this far, thanks! :)
Last Updated 2025-10-12.