Representative Project Experience

Product Manager

  • In conjunction with the staff of the leading regional portal in the US, evolved the Zope4Media product to accomodate high-volume content feeds (tens of thousands of syndicated wire stories per week, along with thousands of stories per week from the partner newspaper). Coached internal Zope development staff and client's software developmeent staff in a variety of topics, including agile development methodology, object oriented framework design, and software reuse.

    Zope + CMF + Zope4Media on all platforms supporte by Zope

  • Over four years, evolved the nascent "Portal Toolkit" effort into the Zope Content Management Framework. Managed contributions from dozens of community developers; enabled the development of higher-level products and platforms (Plone, CPS, Zope4Media, Zope4Intranets) through close coordination with those projects' lead developers. The product is currently late in the release cycle for its fifth stable release.

    Zope + CMF on all platforms supported by Zope

Web Application Developer / Project Lead

  • Replaced the online classified ad system for a nationwide, multi-site media company. The new system included anonymized, "drop box" replies to ads, as well as custom subscriptions which notified the user of new items matching user-specified search criteria.

    Zope + CMF on Solaris

  • For the same multi-site media company, built their next-generation content management system, including complex user-specified workflow, pages composed through-the-web from exisiing content assets, and scheduled content replacement / expiration.

    Zope + CMF on Solaris

Software / Distributed Systems Architect
  • Constructed a new framework for implementing clients to an industry-leading real-time financial and commodity price reporting system. Client application developers need not learn the vendor's complex API, but merely subclass and extend two simple interfaces defined by the framework.

    C++ on Solaris

  • Rearchitected a rate-capture and computation system to ease integration with client systems. The new system delivers both prices and their derivations to clients, and allows the clients to poll or subscribe for real-time notification of "interesting" points on energy commodities curves.

    Middle-tier development using Java 1.1 and OrbixWeb 2.0.1 on NT and Solaris.

  • Laid out the architecture and designed key infrastructure for a mission-critical energy-trading and risk-management system. This system leverages CORBA technologies to create a scalable, high-throughput deal entry and position management environment for the client's traders and analysts. Designed the fault-tolerance architecture for the distributed servers, as well as the "object-by-value" streaming architecture (the CORBA object-by-value specification was adopted 18 months after the project's inception).

    Middle-tier development using Orbix, OrbixTalk, and SPARCWorks C++ on Solaris

    GUI bridge on NT using Orbix, VC++ and Delphi.

  • Designed and built the multi-threaded Orbix server which managed views of traders' aggregated positions. This server listens actively for changes to the trader's portfolio, recomputing the various views and pushing them out to the postiion manager GUI in "near real time".

    Orbix, OrbixTalk, and SPARCWorks C++ on Solaris.

  • For a large producer-neutral energy trading system, built the framework for porting the prototype from X-windows Microsoft Windows, with minimal changes to the domain-specific code of the prototype. Extended the framework to incorporate full functionality of the production release. Mentored functional programming team in Windows programming skills and the framework.

    Client-side: Borland C++ and Winsock on PC's

    Server-side: Tuxedo and Oracle on Sequent/Dynix

  • Constructed toolkit for a Windows-based process monitoring / operator interface for embedded turbine / compressor control systems. Designed classes for real-time display of analog and discrete data, including digital readouts, graphical "switches", real-time trend graphs, and faceplates for tuning process-control loops. In addition, the application is internationalized, running in Russian, Chinese, and English, with data-driven capability for adding others.

    Borland C++ and OWL, Windows 3.1/Workgroups/NT.

Expert-Systems Developer

  • Built a knowledge-based dispatching application for scheduling railroad tank cars through large chemical plants. The application takes into account chemical compatibility between prior and current tank contents, cleaning requirements, and varying availabilities of cars. After deploying this application, the client was able to reduce from four to one full-time dispatchers, producing significantly smoother schedules. This application has been in daily production use for two years with only minor cosmetic modifications.

    Aion (the expert-systems tool), Windows and AS/400.

  • In conjunction with a team of environmental specialists and software developers, built a suite of knowledge-based applications which utilized field survey data to evaluate environmental exposure, current and future regulatory compliance costs, and site reclamation costs. The projections from these models allowed the client to prioritize reclamation and production plans for the surveyed facilities over a five year period.

    Aion, DOS.

Product Designer

  • For a major distributor of wire and panel marking products, built a wirelist-management and marking system. Although originally intended to be distributed gratis with the labels, the distributor discovered that he could profitably sell the application, even to prospects who bought his competitor's labels.

    Borland C++ using TurboVision, DOS

  • Designed and built the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) interface for a pipeline management package. The interface read EDI requests and queried the database for matching data, formatting the data for outbound EDI transmission.

    Gnu C++, Tcl, and Sybase on Sun Solaris.

Database Systems Designer

  • In close coordination with environmental domain experts, designed and built a multi-user database application to manage site survey and sampling data for mercury remediation of hundreds of pipeline meter stations. The application allows construction of multiple prioritization models, each with unique weighting for factors such as soil type, groundwater, proximity to population, etc.

    Paradox for Windows, Windows 3.x.

  • For a major gas marketing company, converted and enhanced their retail gas marketing / imbalance management application from a DOS-based product, which would not run reliably on their newly configured desktops.

    Windows '95, Access 7.0.

Client/Server Development Trainer

  • Taught a five-day Delphi programming class to a group of mixed managers and programmers at a major bank, with all students completing the course objectives successfully.

    Delphi Client/Server 2.0, Windows NT.

  • Trained a major chemical processing company's development team, using the same five-day curriculum for Delphi programming. By the end of the class, the students were successfully constructing and sharing custom components which monitored their real-time production database.

    Delphi Client/Server 1.0, Windows NT.