About Me

I live in Arlington, Massachusetts with my wife Elsa.

Though I’ve got a background as a Web Developer, working primarily in Drupal but with a side order of Ruby and Rails, I’ve spent the last two years in “devops” as one of the engineers behind Acquia Cloud. We give Drupal customers servers to host their sites and tools to manage them, and if asked we will work overtime to keep those sites running. So I spend a lot of time contemplating obscure aspects of the LAMP stack and pushing out code updates to thousands of machines on Amazon Web Services.

I was also once a laser physicist, a biophysicist, and a semiconductor manufacturing engineer — but not all at the same time.

I have a parrot named Ptolemy. (He thinks the world revolves around him.)

I like to write, usually under the byline “Mechanical Fish”. For some reason I’m more likely to write comments on Hacker News than to update my stale blog.

In 2011, the top of my rotating list of hobbies looks like: Baking, sound engineering, puzzles, catching up on remedial linear algebra, and hanging out at the Artisan’s Asylum. One of these days I’ll get back to banjo, piano, brewing, or sailing.

Find Me:

Software Skills

  • Drupal, the open-source social software system, running on Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP
  • Devops, including configuration management with Puppet and Amazon Web Services, Jenkins automation and a lot of Ruby-based scripts and tests.
  • Ruby, PHP, Javascript, jQuery, CSS, HTML/XHTML, SQL, Git, Subversion, Emacs Lisp, Linux system administration.
  • In earlier days: Perl, Oracle and PL/SQL, Tcl, LabVIEW, the Open Architecture Community System.

Work History

  • Senior Cloud Engineer, Acquia, Inc., Burlington, MA (June 2009 – present)

  • Principal Developer, Literate Devices, Inc, Billerica, MA (December 2007 – June 2009)

    • Design, development, and deployment of web sites, primarily in Drupal.
    • Custom Drupal module development.
    • Drupal theming, including CSS and Javascript.

  • Research Scientist, Science Research Laboratory, Inc., Somerville, MA (March 2006 – October 2007)

    • Conceived, designed, and executed optical and electrical experiments on high-power semiconductor lasers in order to improve their operating lifetime.
    • Wrote software in Ruby, Java, LabVIEW, and VBScript for acquisition and analysis of laser data.
    • Designed cooling and monitoring subsystems for a laser diode testing facility; directed machinists and technicians during assembly and operation of the facility.
    • Co-authored funding proposals and reports.

  • Research Fellow, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (March 2003 – March 2006)

    • Studied tumor blood vessels and drug diffusion using novel optical techniques.
    • Assembled, configured, and maintained two-photon microscopy systems.
    • Wrote software in Java, LabVIEW, and C for image acquisition and analysis.
    • Trained and assisted microscope users.
    • Co-authored, reviewed, and edited journal articles and NIH grants.

  • Product Engineer, Agilent Technologies, Semiconductor Products Group, Newark, CA (Dec 2000 – March 2003)

    • Invented, designed, implemented, and maintained a Web-accessible software system (built with Oracle, Linux and Perl) for the capture, storage, retrieval, and display of RF test data and the automated evaluation and rework of semiconductor wafers; used this system to support 20–30 engineers at fabs in the U.S. and Malaysia. This software remains in production at Agilent (now Avago Technologies) and has processed more than 1 billion parts to date.
    • Diagnosed processing problems to improve yields during the manufacturing ramp of the Film Bulk Acoustic Resonator (FBAR).

  • Software Developer, ArsDigita Corporation, Cambridge, MA (April 2000 – November 2000)

    • Developed Oracle-backed Web sites for client companies, using the Open Architecture Community System.
    • Taught Web programming to beginning students.
    • Co-authored a chapter in a software textbook; wrote documentation.

  • Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Electrical Engineering, Cornell University (October 1995 – March 2000)

    • Conducted extensive, hands-on semiconductor process development at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility.
    • Assembled and programmed computer-integrated test systems for measuring and analyzing electrical, optical, and RF-noise characteristics of lasers.
    • Developed analytical models of ring laser asymmetry and bistability.

Education

  • Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

    • Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, May 2000
    • Thesis: Bistability and Unidirectionality in Triangular Ring Diode Lasers
    • Adviser: Dr. Joseph Ballantyne
    • Semiconductor Research Corporation Graduate Fellowship
    • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

  • Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

    • Bachelor of Science in Physics, summa cum laude
    • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Publications

  • C. Ji, M. F. Booth, A. Schremer, and J. M. Ballantyne, “Characterizing relative intensity noise in InGaAsP-InP triangular ring lasers”, IEEE J. Quantum Electronics 41: 925–931 (2005).
  • F. Winkler, S. V. Kozin, R. T. Tong, S-S Chae, M. F. Booth, I. Garkavstev, L. Xu, D. J. Hicklin, D. Fukumura, E. di Tomaso, L. L. Munn, and R. K. Jain, “Kinetics of vascular normalization by VEGFR2 blockade governs brain tumor response to radiation: Role of oxygenation, angiopoietin-1, and matrix metalloproteinases”, Cancer Cell 6: 553–63 (2004).
  • D. G. Duda, D. Fukumura, L. L. Munn, M. F. Booth, E. B. Brown, P. Huang, B. Seed, and R. K. Jain, “Differential transplantability of tumor-associated stromal cells”, Cancer Res. 64: 5920–4 (2004).
  • R. K. Jain and M. F. Booth, Commentary: “What brings pericytes to tumor vessels?”, J. Clin Invest. 112: 1134–6 (2003).
  • M. F. Booth, A. Schremer, and J. M. Ballantyne, “Spatial Beam Switching and Bistability in a Diode Ring Laser”, Appl. Phys. Lett 76: 1095–7 (2000).
  • D. G. Busch, S. Gao, R. A. Pelak, M. F. Booth, and W. Ho, “Femtosecond desorption dynamics probed by time-resolved velocity measurements”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75: 673–6 (1995).
  • R. G. Beck, M. F. Booth, D. E. Farrell, J. P. Rice, and D. M. Ginsberg, “Torque magnetometry: a new probe of dimensionality in high-Tc superconductors”, Phil. Mag. B 65: 1373–9 (1992).
  • D. E. Farrell, R. G. Beck, M. F. Booth, C. J. Allen, E. D. Bukowski, and D. M. Ginsberg, “Superconducting effective mass anisotropy in Tl2Ba2CaCu2Ox”, Phys. Rev. B 42: 6758–6761 (1990).