C3 Metrics

Scaling Infrastructure & High-Volume Processing

One of the largest areas I worked on at C3 Metrics involved modernizing and scaling the systems responsible for ingesting and processing internet traffic and advertising analytics data.

Originally, large amounts of traffic information were being stored in traditional logs and later parsed into databases using Perl scripts. As the platform grew and client demand increased, this approach became increasingly difficult to scale reliably.

I helped transition portions of the infrastructure toward Solr-based indexing and storage systems, dramatically improving scalability, reliability, and overall operational performance. Over time the systems I worked on were supporting more than 9 billion events per day while maintaining production reliability and uptime requirements.

Tracking, Viewability & Browser Technology

When I joined C3 Metrics, browser vendors were beginning to restrict and phase out older tracking technologies. This created major challenges for advertising measurement and viewability tracking systems.

I redesigned large portions of the tracking infrastructure using newer browser-specific technologies and updated viewability systems that are still in use today. This required working around different browser limitations and behaviors across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and other environments.

The JavaScript tracking systems also needed to execute extremely quickly to avoid negatively impacting client websites. Tracking code generally needed to complete execution within roughly 30 milliseconds while still collecting meaningful advertising and user interaction data.

Google Ads Data Hub Integration

One of the most technically difficult projects I worked on involved adapting our tracking systems after Google stopped supporting some traditional tracking methods, particularly around YouTube advertising.

Google began working directly with us on a replacement approach using Ads Data Hub with a BigQuery backend. This required completely redesigning portions of our ingestion and attribution systems because the new data was no longer user-specific in the same ways our previous systems expected.

The new environment also included strict privacy requirements that prevented queries from returning small enough result sets to identify users. I had to design new algorithms and data aggregation approaches that could still produce useful attribution information while operating inside those restrictions.

The very first time we enabled the integration, the amount of incoming data was large enough that we had to temporarily redirect it into null logs because it threatened to overwhelm the system. After working closely with Google teams, I helped design a solution that satisfied both their requirements and our operational needs.

Leadership, Deployments & Operations

A typical day at C3 Metrics started with standups involving the development team and head of QA where we would review current work, deployment schedules, and testing timelines. Deployments were generally scheduled for Thursdays so that any required rollback work could happen on Friday if needed.

After standups I would regularly coordinate with account management teams regarding onboarding timelines, client requests, and operational priorities. Depending on current projects, I would also meet with executive leadership to discuss upcoming features, technical changes, or production concerns.

Weekly meetings were held twice per week, while the rest of the day was generally focused on project work, production issues, scaling improvements, or high-priority client concerns.

During deployments I stayed directly involved with both the deploying developer and QA team in voice communication while production changes were verified live. Even after staging and QA approval, I believed strongly in reviewing production deployments directly after release to ensure systems behaved correctly under real-world conditions.

Mentoring & Team Building

One of the accomplishments I am most proud of from my career was helping build and lead both the development and QA teams at C3 Metrics.

Many of the developers we hired were either new graduates or very early in their careers. Beyond teaching technical skills, I spent significant time mentoring them on professional engineering practices, communication, debugging approaches, prioritization, and how software development works inside a real production environment.

I also regularly organized coding challenges for newer developers as both a learning exercise and team-building activity. These included logic problems, algorithm exercises, and programming puzzles designed to encourage problem solving and creative thinking.