Qualifications

Extensive programming knowledge -- 30 years of programming experience in many fields
High quality code -- well documented, well structured, and easily maintained designs, every time
Skilled tutoring -- enjoy mentoring and teaching others, directly and through good documentation
Experience building large, high-capacity systems -- including a multi-million user consumer web service for AvantGo, and a multi-million license application middleware for SAP
Experience working with and managing worldwide teams -- across Europe, Asia, and America
Strong interests in education, open source development, Internet-related technologies, and 3D graphics
Award-winning dedication, teamwork, skill set, and performance

Professional Experience

4/10-Present Contract Developer, FairChoice Health, 3 Phase Computing, Inc., New York City (remote)

Lead web developer of FairChoice Health 4, a vaccination/insurance/health compliance system for universities

Assisted insourcing of fragile, unfactored, externally developed code base
Refactored to reduce developer friction, standardize code behavior, and eliminate hidden bugs
Introduced automated testing, with immediate success diagnosing longstanding issues
Developed major new features within very short timeframes
Rapidly advanced from zero knowledge of implementation languages and product domain to most productive member of programming team

8/09-Present Lead Developer, Plumage, Parrot VM Project

Lead designer and developer of Plumage, Parrot's module ecosystem and install tools

Synthesized a shared vision for Plumage from disparate goals among Parrot users and core team
Designed a module ecosystem and metadata standard to meet that shared vision
Developed libraries and an easy to use tool to introspect metadata and perform recursive installations
Continue to iterate and improve end to end Plumage ecosystem

4/08-Present Lead Developer, OpenGL Subsystem, Parrot VM Project

Lead developer of OpenGL subsystem for Parrot, the virtual machine for dynamic languages

Created standard Parrot bindings to OpenGL and related libraries (GLU, GLX, GLUT, etc.)
Supported many different releases and library variations on Windows, OS X, and Linux
Created tools to automatically generate all trivial bindings by parsing system header files, allowing effort to be concentrated on edge cases and complex APIs
Documented and worked around many limitations of Parrot's current NCI APIs
Developed several OpenGL test/example scripts, each one written in multiple Parrot languages

12/05-3/10 Senior Developer, UsenetISP, LLC, Santa Rosa

Principle developer, administrator, and support responder for usenet-to-web gateway

Designed and hand-tuned video transcode engine to add in-browser playback of videos
One of the first web sites to add H.264 transcoding for high quality Flash playback and iPod download support
Successfully developed and launched two UI redesigns, with significant new features each time
Expanded product base from one service to several, including quota-tiered raw NNTP support
Created affiliate partner program with automatic revenue sharing, flexible ad system, and partner dashboard
Relentlessly optimized software and systems to manage ever-increasing load and feature support in a "no capital expenditures" environment
Refactored large, extremely difficult to maintain code base to use single points of truth, clean separation of concerns, and readable code
Converted many manual processes to automated replacements: self-tuning server work queues, automatic spam blocking, real source control, etc.
Handled all support tickets and most systems administration across server farm

10/04-8/05 Contract Author, Perl.com, O'Reilly Media, Inc., Sebastopol

Contract author for premier publisher of Perl books and online articles.

Polished, detailed writing -- writing sample published as first article
Wrote first three articles of open-ended series on Building a 3D Engine in Perl; positive feedback led to contract extension for more
Created authoring and editing tools allowing editor to handle articles several times longer than average without additional effort
Detailed proofreading caught numerous errors introduced during online production process
Responded at length to reader emails, helping to resolve difficulties with prerequisite tools and concepts

2/05-4/05 Contract Developer, IT Operations Change Management, Autodesk, Inc., San Rafael

Maintenance developer of IT change management system, created during previous full-time employment at Autodesk.

Merged multiple forked versions of codebase created since previous maintainership
Fixed numerous bugs introduced since previous maintainership
Followed agile development model, with intense one to two week develop-test-release cycles and daily interaction with customers
Designed, developed, and implemented new four-tier source control-centered release model, with independent development, QA, stage, and production
Refactored reporting subsystem and greatly increased reporting functionality
Massively improved performance of critical transactions, improving end user experience while increasing functionality
Deeply documented support and development best practices; praised by manager and support staff for documentation quality

8/02-10/04 Senior Support Engineer, IT Applications Production Support, Autodesk, Inc., Petaluma

Lead developer of the Production Support intranet and new IT change management system, as well as the team lead/acting manager for Middleware Support.

Administered Postalsoft, SeeBeyond, Apache, and team Unix/Linux servers
Stabilized fragile, aging C codebase and build system of Postalsoft, resulting in simpler, more reliable builds, and vastly fewer support issues
Considered local expert in Perl, CVS, Linux, and other open source technologies, teaching and mentoring many others
Performed numerous meticulous, highly-valued documentation and code reviews
Built and evangelized Mason-based Production Support intranet, including custom calendaring and documentation management systems
Successfully evangelized standards-based, author-friendly documentation infrastructure, resulting in largest and highest-quality technical documentation repository in IT
Built incident reporting system used by all Production Support groups, and change management system used by all of IT
Built many specialized support tools, replacing difficult, time-consuming tasks with automated solutions
Represented the interests and knowledge of the team in a number of key business initiatives, including Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
Greatly increased management skill set, through self-study, formal management skills courses, and on-the-job training
Managed mixed US and India team as Middleware Support Team Lead, including personnel reviews, individual and team meetings, and management status reports
Managed as Acting Manager of Middleware Support, with additional duties including management meetings, standardizing various support processes, and hiring staff in India; praised by Manager and Director for management skill

4/99-11/01 Senior Software Engineer, AMI Engineering Group, AvantGo, Inc., San Mateo

Lead Perl engineer for the AvantGo Mobile Internet service, AvantGo's consumer-oriented division.

Earned dedication award, 1999
Earned teamwork award, 2001
Perl, HTML, Mason, C, and SQL development using FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL, and CVS
Built secure confirmation system for managing password resets, email bans, etc.
Built securely authenticated session data manager, and iterated for scalability over several generations
Built efficient, maintainable database access abstraction layer supporting extensive logging and profiling capabilities
Built L10N and I18N system, successfully balancing CPU efficiency with highly readable document source required by non-programmer AMI team members
Converted many monolithic, static page designs produced by the design group into dynamic, componentized Mason code, while allowing easy continued maintenance by designers
Wrote first version of Perl interface to C based pluggable data provider system using XS
Initiated port of next-generation C language client software to GTK+, allowing much easier debugging of platform-independent code in the client; praised by client team core developers for quality and value of codebase transferred to their group
Scaled multi-megabyte codebase from AMI's inception to use by millions of customers
Administered department's master development server
Considered to be company's Perl guru, assisting and teaching many other employees

9/96-4/99 Developer, Advanced Technology Group, SAP Labs, Inc., Palo Alto

Developer, build manager, and development support contact for SAP Employee Self Service, an end-user friendly web-based front-end for the human resources, time entry, expenses, and purchase requisition portions of the SAP R/3 system, allowing both connected and disconnected operation.

Perl, VB, HTML, shell, and InstallShield development under WinNT
Managed build, source control, and test environments under WinNT
Wrote a large portion of the product documentation, and edited the rest
Created COM objects, test programs, and HTML code used in the middleware layer
Improved product through all 6 releases; most recent release had 3 million licenses
Managed multi-language build and install procedure for 2700+ file, 130+ MB hierarchical project
Built metaprogramming engine to create complete middleware COM objects from simple descriptions
Fielded customer support questions that could not be answered by regional support staff; often praised for skill in handling difficult customers and explaining complex solutions
Evangelized the use of Linux, Perl and Apache at SAP; supported successful grassroots effort to begin support of and development for open source platforms, reversing original management position
Initiated port of R/3 build system to platform-neutral Perl, replacing poorly documented platform-specific programs with maintainable code that works equally well on Linux, Unix, and WinNT
Considered to be local Linux and Perl guru, teaching others how to install and effectively use both

6/93-9/96 Systems Engineer, Western Region, SAP America, Inc., Foster City

Server, network, phone system, and demo equipment installation, repair, and maintenance.

Earned Regional Vice President Super Star award, 1994
Started as only systems engineer in western region; department grew 10-fold during my tenure
Experience with WinNT, Win95, Windows for Workgroups, OS/2, and various niche systems
Wrote HTTP sniffing programs used to find major Internet Explorer incompatibility bug in partner's product, preventing embarrassment in demo with Bill Gates
Wrote bandwidth-friendly opt-in mass mailer program used to advertise SAP Tech Ed, contributing to rapid growth of that event
Wrote many data format translation programs that saved significant time and money when working with external vendors

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science -- University of California, Berkeley
Awarded Chancellor's Scholarship, Berkeley's highest merit-based undergraduate scholarship

Other Experience

Lifelong interest in computers and programming -- began computing at age 3, programming at age 7
First programming experiences were of cleaning up poorly documented spaghetti code, making a lasting impression of the value of maintainable code style
Experienced in many languages and systems, from CP/M to Windows to Linux, and from Assembly to C to Perl, and countless others between
Created a real-time 3D rendering engine in pure Perl, then optimized the computation kernels in C
Created an ANS Forth with extensive debugging tools in pure Perl, to better understand threaded interpreter design and Perl performance characteristics
Administer a sizeable Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows home network, including a secured file/mail/print/VCS server and a hand-tuned router/firewall, upgraded over time from ipfwadm to ipchains and finally to iptables, all without significant downtime or a successful attack