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3/05 - Present
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Self Employed
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Artist and Fire Fighter and ...?
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I am striking out as an artist, attempting to do that as a full time profession. In addition,
I am in training to be a volunteer fire fighter, and should start responding to calls in May
of 2006. Only time will tell if all this works out, but I think it will.
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10/99 - 3/05
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XO Communications
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Senior Software Engineer & Manager
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XO builds and maintains a large, custom written, shared, web hosting
platform called "Metra." This platform provides web hosting, mail,
and other services to hundreds of thousands of web sites, under several
different co-brands. My major contributions here included:
- Supported many aspects of the Metra product. Assisted with
problem diagnosis and resolution, customer escalations,
system monitoring, etc.
- Architected, designed, and implemented parts of a Windows based
shared web hosting add-on platform for Metra. This system allows
Windows based web hosting (and things like ASP scripting as a result)
but takes advantage of much of the existing Metra infrastructure.
- Support for an older e-commerce platform on Metra, maintaining its
stability and creating tools and mechanisms to allow it to auto-recover
from problems. In addition, I diagnosed and repaired problems within it that
could not be automatically recovered from.
This product was Sybase based, made extensive use of Perl code, and
was heavily customized when it was added to the system. Much of my
work here involved discovering the reasons for why things were done
in particular ways before I joined the company; it bordered on
software archaeology.
- Integrated a new e-commerce application -- Miva -- into the Metra
platform. Provided ongoing support for this was my responsibility as
well, but I hired and trained my replacement for this work.
- Designed and implemented a set of web (CGI) based tools for
administering the Windows shared portions of Metra. These tools
are used on a daily basis by the care and operations teams to facilitate
their work, as well as the QE staff to validate the operation of new
features in the system. New tools and functionality were regularly added to
this system.
- Developed many system monitoring tools. Mostly custom written in
Perl, these monitor various aspects of Metra and announce failures
or anomalies to the right people for correction and/or research.
- Architectural participation in several other projects and features
currently in various stages of planning or development, or release, including
custom SPAM filtering and others.
- First line management of three different departments. One was dedicated
to the Windows based shared hosting platform listed above. The second was a
general 3rd party application integration team. The third team was
largely concerned with ongoing work on major system daemons.
The decision to leave XO was a hard one, but I needed a new and different
focus in my life.
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3/97 - 10/99
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Chordiant Software, Inc.
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Senior Engineer
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Chordiant Software develops call center software for Fortune 2000
companies. My responsibilities included product installation
development, release engineering, product CD production, configuration
management, configuration management tool development, and most
anything else that came up between engineering and shipping the product.
The two largest projects were:
- Development of the installation process for the Chordiant product;
300K of Perl code handling complex installation issues on four
separate platforms (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Windows-NT) and
running on one of three different databases (Oracle, Sybase, or Informix).
A single set of Perl scripts and libraries ran on all four platforms
and handled all the specific issues.
- A set of patch application tools to update running systems in the
field to a later release level. All development was in Perl again for
cross platform portability.
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10/95 - 12/97
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Castellan Communications
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Founding Partner
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Co-Founded Castellan Communications to provide web site setup, maintenance, and hosting for several customers.
Castellan shut down in 1997 to allow us to pursue other activities.
- Maintained our own server and software (Linux, Apache, etc.).
- Developed and enhanced HTML based web sites.
- Everything else associated with running a small business: taxes, customer contacts,
etc.
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9/96 - 3/97
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Legato Systems, Inc.
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Senior Engineer
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Legato is a major maker of backup software systems.
- Build and release engineer for several versions of Legato Networker under development.
- Maintained the build systems.
- Improved nightly build scripts and tools.
- Automated some aspects of release engineering within the existing tool set.
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4/90 - 9/96
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Amdahl Corporation
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Staff Software Engineer & Manager
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Amdahl manufactured large, IBM compatible main frame computers. In addition,
they developed and maintained a version of UNIX (called UTS) to run on those
computers. I worked on the UTS operating system in various ways, including:
- Developed all software to link a bug tracking system (Scopus ProTeam)
and a version control system (Sun's TeamWare) to provide a cohesive
tool set for Amdahl's Solaris based software development.
Wrote a reporting tool to extract problem report (PR) data from
Sybase (the database we used underneath Scopus ProTeam).
Produced a web (CGI) based PR query interface. Wrote a WAIS-like
tool in Perl to build a permuted index of all words in HTML files
and search it for keywords.
- Did extensive testing and risk analysis of a high speed sort program.
Wrote test plans, did analysis of code quality and some performance
investigation. Primary concentration on functional testing.
- Ported UNIX commands to IBM S/390 and SPARC platforms. Increased
command functionality, scaled them to large systems,
tracked USL's SVR4 changes, incorporated those changes into Amdahl's
UTS code base, and produced relevant engineering documentation.
- Volunteered to do acceptance testing of a new C compiler by building
and booting Amdahl's UNIX system. In six months, over 60 compiler
bugs were isolated and reported. I received a director's award for
this work.
- Managed the command and library department for six months. Was acting
manager of the configuration management department for two months
while we looked for new permanent managers.
- Developed internally used tools and participated in various process and
productivity improvement groups. Taught a C programming class to
infrequent users of the language and spent substantial time assisting
other engineers with various programming problems.
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6/86 - 4/90
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Spectra Physics, Inc.
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Software Engineer
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Spectra Physics made high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) instrumentation
for the chemical analysis and process control fields. I developed software to
support their instruments in various ways.
- Designed and implemented both programmatic and user interfaces into a
proprietary laboratory instrument network (LABNET) as part of two HPLC
applications. Both programs interfaced with the HPLC instruments via a
Z80 based networking card
in a PC system. The first product did instrument setup, run
initialization, and instrument monitoring on PC-DOS based systems.
The second product ran on OS/2 and added more sophisticated
monitoring, data collection, and data processing. This product made
extensive use of threads and IPCs and involved programming under
Presentation Manager.
- Developed a LABNET network monitor to enable debugging of network
level problems.
- Planned and architected a 68000 based instrument controller intended to
replace LABNET. Plans included a real-time kernel (pSOS) and processes
for setup, control, and monitoring of various instruments via RS-232
communications.
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