About Tony Tam

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tony tam life's mission

Contact

LinkedIn @tonytamsf
Email: tony@impactfulengineer.org

Personal Interests

Founder of San Francisco Badminton Social Group SFbadminton.org

Investor in a sushi restaurant in Burlingame, CA iprivesake.com

Writing blog posts at tonytam.org

Professional Background

Tony Tam has worked as a software engineer for over 20+ years at SGI, Yahoo and Splunk.

He started as an intern in 1993 at Silicon Graphics. In 1999, he was super curious how the home page of www.yahoo.com was so fast and reliable so he applied to work at Yahoo (now Oath).

He built Yahoo News to become the #1 news website in the world.

He partnered with Associate Press, Reuters, New York Time and 50+ news website to build one of the best, fastest, and most comprehensive news website in Yahoo News. He built innovative editorial tools for Yahoo News editors to display automatic photo sideshows, the first most emailed new page aggregating in real-time and easy to use editorial tools to combine the freshness of breaking news and the editorial voice of human news editors.

He built and designed systems to withstand the infinite demand for content during 9/11. His software has handled spikes in news traffic during the Michael Jackson death, the first Iraq war, and all the U.S. elections from 1999 to 2006 and all the notable news events during those 17 years.

He has mentored over 20 engineers to grow their impact in large organizations.

After he architect and help built the back-end system to replace 150 different news systems at Yahoo, he found his true calling when he help cultivate an engineering community of 350 engineers.

He joined Splunk in 2016, as Senior Principal Software Engineer focusing on engineering productivity.

Engineering Productivity focuses on

  • New hire training and boot camp
  • CI/CD systems
  • Tools for building, debugging, compiling software
  • Education of engineers in new skills they need to do their current job as well as the near future tasks
  • Engagement of the engineers with the organization.
  • Documentation

Everything that affects how engineers get their code created, tested, shipped could fall into engineering productivity.

See Also

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