Qualifications

Extensive programming knowledge -- 25 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

10/04-present 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 several 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

02/05-04/05 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

08/02-10/04 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; service is still going strong with over 10 million users and over 1 million device syncs per day
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
Administer a sizeable Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows home network, including a secured file/mail/print/cvs 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