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Various
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Self Employed
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Artist, Stone Carving Teacher, Contract Programmer
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I'm an artist creating original sculpture, mostly in stone. In addition to creating my own sculpture I teach
stone carving to other artists. I've taken a couple of short programming contracts but I try to stay focused
on my art.
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6/10 - 12/10
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Kosmix
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Release Engineer
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Ran the build and release cycle for some of Kosmix's products, made changes to it, and
coordinated feature releases and bug fixes with engineers. Enhanced and modified release
process and tools as needed. This was a heavily Perl based release engineering environment.
Also monitored systems and responded when they were down, 24x7.
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11/08 - 11/09
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XO Communications
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Senior Software Engineer & Manager
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I returned to XO to work on their new virtual server platform.
It is based on Xen and involved quite a bit of custom Perl
scripting to build and drive the infrastructure, which is where
I spent my time. I added several major new features to the
platform and fixed numerous bugs. In addition I managed and
trained two people on the platform, including my eventual replacement.
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09/05 - 11/08
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Loma Prieta Volunteer Fire and Rescue
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Volunteer Fire Fighter
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I volunteered with my local fire department to help keep my
community safer. During this time I went through regular training
and responded to all kinds of things that people call 911 for:
medical aid requests, fires, auto accidents, and so on.
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10/99 - 3/05
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XO Communications (formerly Concentric Network)
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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, email,
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 a Windows based shared
web hosting add-on platform for Metra. This system allows
Windows based web hosting (and Windows specific features like
ASP scripting as a result) but takes advantage of the existing
Metra infrastructure where ever possible.
- Supported 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 why things were done in particular ways before I joined
the company; it bordered on software archeology.
- Integrated a new e-commerce application - Miva - into the Metra
platform. Providing 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. I regularly added new
tools and functionality 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 at different
times: Windows based shared hosting platform development; 3rd
party application integration; major system daemon development.
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3/97 - 10/99
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Chordiant Software, Inc.
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Senior Sofware 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 Software 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 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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