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Badgertronics / Borkware
arsDigita
AOL
Visix
Nuclear Medicine
Web Site Development
Technical Details

Professional Experience (most recent first)

2001-present Integrated Badgertronics / Borkware

Integrated Badgertronics is my personal website. Borkware is my Macintosh OS X software development identity.

November 2001 - present

• Constructed the Core Bootcamp course for the Big Nerd Ranch. Co-authored the course materials, which has been published as the book Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming.

• Author of the forthcoming ebook, Learn Objective-C On The Macintosh.

• Founding member of CocoaHeads, a Macintosh programming group, with Chapters in Pittsburgh and Boston. A third chapter is forming in the midwest.

• Worked with team at NOMOS on the CORVUS IMRT radiological treatment system. Implemented mechanism for reading data from NeXTstep-system generated DAT tapes using Apple's STUC (SCSI Toolkit User Client) libraries. Cleaned up user experience dealing with SCSI magneto-optical disks (including working around errors in Apple's disk arbitration daemon in Jaguar, and updating it to use the DiskArbitration SPIs included in Panther and Tiger), refactored a number of user interface components to use a new data model for feeding data to several Cocoa tableviews, and a customized 2-D and 3-D histogram view. Also debugged some Xcode build issues, and fixed rasterization problems in their printing architecture.

• Created Mac OS X cross stitch design software for The QueenStitch.

• Worked with team at Hobnob to implement a RADIUS proxy with 802.1X authentication using FreeRADIUS and OpenLDAP. Assisted with the design of an in-house test management system using PostgreSQL and PHP. Assisted with the design of a network device registration system.

• Worked with team at away.com, built a system to import travel book data from a back-office system into the live site. Built prototype for shopping cart. Built system to import trip data from GORP.com's database into the away.com system. Advised the team on Oracle database migration strategies. Was a technical "go-to" person for their staff when they had unix, oracle, AOLserver, or CVS questions.

• Worked with the team at 1-800-save-a-pet in diagnosing and fixing web server and scalability issues. Included upgrading the web server software on the production site, addressing Oracle scalability issues, moving the Oracle database off of the web server front-end onto its own machine. Was a technical "go-to" guy and site performance firefighter.

• Completed Oracle 8i DBA Certification

• Attended Big Nerd Ranch, Mac OS X development training.

• Studied various technologies, such as Java (AWT/Swing), Python, Postgresql, OpenGL, Test-Driven Development and Extreme Programming.

• Created Borkware
  • Published numerous technical articles on different aspects of programming and technology
  • Published numerous freeware utility programs, all with source code availability.
  • Created Borkware Quickies, a repository of useful technical snippits.
  • Created support site, based on OpenACS, for the Core book.

• Published numerous technical articles at the now-defunct MacEdition website.

• Presented a tutorial on C Programming for The Western Pennsylvania Linux User's Group

• Presented a tutorial on gdb (the GNU Debugger)x for The Western Pennsylvania Linux User's Group. The talk was filmed and placed online.

1999-2001 arsDigita

arsDigita specialized in database-backed web sites and collaborative/community web applications. We did much of the low-level technological work, such as web hosting, db design and administration for high-volume web sites.

March 1999 - November 2001

• Internal resource, called in to consult on projects that had scalability or production stability issues.

• Was half of the team that ported the GuideStar Legacy Site from NT/ColdFusion/Informix/Verity to Unix/AOLserver/Oracle/Intermedia

  Worked on GuideStar Pro's integrated searching system, which was adopted by AOL's helping.org

• Took over ownership of The Green Travel Network. Fixed existing problems, extended tracking and reporting.

• Part of the team doing the redesign and Extreme Extension of Green Travel into Away.com. This involved scaling the site from 100,000 hits per day to over 4,000,000 hits per day over the course of a year.

• Responsible for ongoing maintenance and support for Away.com, including training their technical staff, answering questions, and advising on database, operating system, and web server issues.

• Part of the Site 59 team, maintaining WorldSpan travel reservation system integration, as well as on-call support for flight and hotel pricing issues.

• Worked with team that implemented a user authentication gateway for Proteome's (now Incyte) genomic gateway.

• Worked on requirements gathering team for the Democratic National Committee

• Worked with the system administration team and the company's DBA. While at arsDigita I completed 2 out of 5 Oracle DBA certification tests (sql and pl/sql, plus networking)

• Wrote a Guide to CVS to help my peers more effectively use revision control.

• Authored article on AOLserver performance tuning

• contributed modules to the arsDigita Community System (ACS), such as the polls module (for ACS 3.X), and contributed to the Spam module (in ACS 4.X)

• Took over ownership of the Oracle Driver and took it from version 0.6 to version 2.1. Also supported end-users in driver installation and server configuration.

• Wrote Traffic Jamme, a freely-available (GPL) web server load tool.

• Finished up Cassandrix, a freely-available unix disk space monitoring tool, after original developer left the company.

• Brought the Linux RocketStart program to completion. RocketStart was Linux (or Solaris) computer pre-configured with Oracle, AOLserver, CVS, ACS, and other supporting utilities, with the idea that a customer could purchase the computer and get up and running with a community site in zero time.

1995-1999 - America Online

AOLserver (February 1997-February 1999)

AOLserver was originally NaviServer, a product of NaviSoft), and was acquired by AOL. When the California development office was shut down only one of the NaviServer staff came to the East coast, so a new team was formed to maintain and extend the software

I was the technical lead for AOLserver after it was moved to the East coast and handled all of the day-to-day details of support, development, and maintenance (with emphasis on the support and maintenance). I shepheared AOLserver from release 2.1 through 2.3.3.

Support

• Supported teams internal to AOL through telephone, email, and geek-to-geek contact
• Supported a few hundred organizations external to AOL via the AOLserver mailing list and directly via the support mail addresses (feedback/bugs@AOLserver.com)
• Participated in customer mailing lists and message boards
• Front-line diagnosis of production issues

Development

• Added new features as the customer base needed them
• Developed caching module in use on mynews.aol.com
• Developed AOLserver versions of AOL-internal HTTP verification protocols
• Extended server logging to better support in-the-field diagnostics
• Added select loop scheduling for page serving
• Added low-level "server health" statistic tracking
• Developed UDP communications driver

Maintenance

• Fixed defects (bugs) inherited from original NaviServer developers
• Extended Sybase proxy daemon
• Worked on benchmarking and performance tuning
• Overhauled/rewrote defect-prone portions of the code.
• Overhauled build system
• Cleaned up internal APIs
• Integrated features and fixes donated by the customer base
• Y2K certification of the code base
• Code optimizations
• Ported AOLserver to new platforms (Solaris x86, HP-UX 11.00)

IP Tools Development (November 1995-February 1997)

Tools Development

I was chief architect for the Macintosh Rainman tool. Rainman is AOL's proprietary templating-based publishing system. At the time, the only interface to Rainman was via emailing text scripts to a robot process and monitoring return email. The Rainman tool provided a visual interface to this publishing process.

• Designed internal application flow of control for eventual support of AppleScript and Undo
• Worked with MS-platform counterparts to coordinate technologies
• Mentored junior team member
• Implemented platform independent "Flavor" data storage architecture
• Implemented core infrastructure, database access, element communication
• Set up source code structure, build infrastructure, revision control, and guided engineering policies
• Fixed software defects and performed performance testing and measurement
• Got product to a late beta state before the team was relocated to California
• Received fan mail from the California team. "Yours is the only code we haven't had to fix or rewrite"

Macintosh 3.0 Client

The IP Tools Macintosh team (3 programmers) was loaned to the Macintosh 3.0 client team for a number of months to help them meet an impending release deadline.

February - April 1996

• Helped verify tickets in Vantive database
• Implemented HotSpots (AOL-Style image maps)
• Hooked Stuffit decompression libraries into the file download pipeline
• Added PICT picture decoder
• Added display of image files as they download

1990-1995 - Visix Software, Reston, VA

Galaxy

Quality Assurance

June 1995 - November 1995

• Instigated the formation of a quality assurance team.
• Helped design unit test strategy and test implementation.

Galaxy/DB Spectrum

Galaxy/DB Spectrum is an add-on product to Galaxy that provides portable database connectivity and a report generation system.

January - February 1995

• Helped team that was behind schedule.
• Implemented report item architecture.
• Implemented some UI objects.
• Designed and implemented the number/date formatting architecture, which uses Excel-style picture strings to describe the formatting options.

Galaxy Developer's Conference

The Galaxy Developer's Conference is an annual 3-day conference for Galaxy users where Visix personnel lecture on Galaxy programming techniques.

September 1994, 95

• Authored and presented talks on creating Galaxy dialog items, software reusability, and using the Galaxy list manager.

Galaxy Explorations

Galaxy Explorations is a quarterly newsletter for Galaxy customers, featuring technical and marketing articles.

Fall 1993 - 1995

• Authored 6 "Tips and Techniques" articles, covering topics from image animation to control customization to the use of the Galaxy memory manager.

Galaxy Help System

The Galaxy Help System is a pair of applications (a help source compiler and a help browser similar to QuickView) in addition to Galaxy library support for on-line help.

February - November 1994

• Helped team that was behind schedule.
• Designed and implemented architecture for the help compiler.
• Implemented portions of help server, including table of contents, search UI, bookmarks, browser history, and preference UI.

Trade Shows and Demos

Authored demo software used in the trade show booth as well as in sales seminars and presentations.

April 1993 - May 1995

• Designed and implemented WallDemo - a demo targeted at wall-street businesses.
• Designed and implemented MTS - a demo to elaborate on a "Managing Technology Change" marketing strategy.
• Was part of the team writing a proof-of-concept phone-representative information system for the Vanguard Group. Designed and implemented user interface components.

Consulting

I was the first Visix consultant.

December 1992 - March 1993 at JP Morgan, Wall Street

• Worked with Morgan team developing trading-desk software.
• Implemented interface between Morgan communication libraries and Galaxy.
• Designed and implemented a charting architecture.
• Galaxy evangelism: writing demos, giving presentations, and answering questions to hostile groups inside of Morgan.

List Manager

The Galaxy list manager is a trio of objects in the Galaxy library. One, the list, is a dynamic 2-dimensional table data structure of arbitrary size and customizable data representation. The second is the list selection, which implements a logical set of list cells that are selected. The third, the list view, is a scrolling table displaying the data contained in a list. The listview supports varying row heights/column widths, row/column rearranging, as well as providing complete control over cell drawing and selection logic.

June 1991 - 1995

• Designed, implemented, documented, maintained, and supported.

Looking Glass

Looking Glass 3.0 sound

Looking Glass 3.0 includes sound effects for different user interface actions.

1991

• Determined where in the libraries and application to add the hooks for the sound routines, and implemented these hooks.
• Designed and implemented the user interface for associating the sounds with their actions.

Looking Glass Maintenance and Support

June 1990 - 1992

• Bug fixing and maintenance on the SunView (a Sun graphical environment) and EnvironV (an Intergraph graphical environment) portions of the Looking Glass toolkit.
• Supported Looking Glass on all of its platforms via telephone, email, and customer visits.

1987-88 John L. McClellan VA Hospital (Little Rock, AR)

Department of Nuclear Medicine

• Assembled a half-dozen PC clones from spare parts
• Developed an radioactive isotope tracking and reporting system in DBase II
• Developed a quality control/effort summary and reporting system for Nuclear Medicine in DBase II
• Developed an end-user data-entry system for the above effort summary system.
• This system is still in use at University of Nebraska, Medical Center
• In 1991, Inspectors from the JCAHCO (Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations) said it was one of the best systems of its kind

Web Site Development

• Integrated Badgertronics, http://www.badgertronics.com
  • My personal home page
  • Built using AOLserver and Oracle
  
  
  
• Borkware, http://borkware.com
  • Built using OpenACS 4
  
  
  
• First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Leechburg
  • Built using ACS 4/Tcl
  
  
  
• Call-Volume Reduction Taskforce.
  • This is an AOL-internal website that a special team of Call Center representatives use when "drilling-down" on client crashing problems in the field
  • Replaces a kludgey cut-and-paste email system with a database-backed web site
  • Provides reports to Call Center management and the Call-Volume Reduction Taskforce
  • Built using AOLserver and the Solid relational database
  
  
  
• Loudoun Symphony, http://www.loudounsymphony.org
  • Re-keyed most of the content from hard-copy (orchestra concert programs and other printed material)
  • Adapted Philip Greenspun's "Spam" mailing list software
  • Re-engineered Greenspun's "Loquacious" commentary system (since he hasn't published the source code to that)
  • Implemented a scheduling system for storing rehearsal and performance information. (See the Player's Resources page to see rehearsal dates pulled from the database) This same database can be used by board members to announce meetings, etc
  • Digitized and compressed audio for serving to Quicktime 3.0 enabled browsers.
  • Built using AOLserver and Oracle
  
  
  

Technical Details

Computer Languages

• Used C, C++, Objective C, Tcl, Pascal, Oracle SQL, Oracle PL/SQL, PostgreSQL, and HTML on a day-to-day basis
• Studied Fortran, Perl, Python, Postgresql, and Java
• Dabbled in Tk, Dylan, Scheme, and Emacs Lisp

Unix Experience

• Am colocating and maintaining a production Linux box. (the machine that hosts www.badgertronics.com, among others)
• Emacs weenie
• Proficient with debuggers (dbx, gdb, ladebug)
• Proficient with revision control systems (CVS, Perforce)
• Used profiling tools (gprof, atom, decthreads)
• Proficient with Pure Software tools (purify, pure coverage, quantify)
• Used Solaris/Sparc 2.x, HP-UX 10.xx, Irix 6.2, Digital Unix 4.0D, LinuxPPC, Linux, Mac OS X on a day-to-day basis
• Used Solaris/x86, HP-UX 11.00, Irix 5.3, FreeBSD, on an irregular basis
• Have ported and supported code to all of the above platforms
• Have used AIX and many obscure Unix flavors in the past
• Have spent time with MkLinux, LinuxPPC, FreeBSD 2.2.x,
• Worked with Sybase, Oracle, Solid, and PostgreSQL relational databases
• Member of WPLUG, Western Pennsylvania Linux User's Group's board of directors.

Database Experience

• Worked with Oracle SQL and PL/SQL on a daily basis
• Diagnosed and fixed production performance problems
• Completed Oracle 8i DBA Certification in March of 2002
• Attended Big Nerd Ranch PostgreSQL bootcamp, led by Bruce Momjian.

Macintosh Experience

• 2002 - Present, teach the Core Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch
• 2002 - PresentAttended Big Nerd Ranch Cocoa (a.k.a. NeXTstep) training, and PostgreSQL training.
• 2003 - Attended WWDC
• 1986 - Macintosh Programming Seminar Apple Computer, David Smith instructing.
• 1990-1994 - Attended MacHack technical conference.
• 1996 - Attended WWDC

Miscellaneous Notes

• Studied the Personal Software Process and Extreme Programming, and am interested in software processes in general, and in particular how to increase the quality of software at the beginning of the process rather than trying to hack it in at the end.
• Active member of Western Pennsylvania Linux User's Group and CocoaHeads.
• Proficient Balloon Twister
• I am a voracious reader of technical material.

Education

References available on request.