LINUX AND UNIX SOFTWARE ARCHITECT AND ENGINEER

• Self-motivated, hands-on and solutions-oriented professional
• Full system product and lifecycle experience
• 23 years of experience designing and building real solutions
• Able to work under tight deadlines and meet them
• Excellent written and oral communication skills for customer or in-house presentations.
• Very comfortable with hands-on hardware configuration and troubleshooting.
• Expertise in high-availability and high-performance cluster software.

CAREER OBJECTIVE

SKILLS

LEADERSHIP: Tech lead, OS integration and delivery (4 months), team/project lead (5 years), system architect (6 years)

OPERATING SYSTEMS: Linux (5 years), Unix (20 years - IRIX 15 years, various SVr3 versions 5 years), AmigaDOS (5 years), VAX/VMS (5 years)

TECHNOLOGIES USED: OOA/OOD, stream and block ciphers (PGP, custom), kernel (Linux, IRIX), network protocols (TCP/IP, STP, HTTP) web scripting (perl, shell, CGI-bin), SCM tools (CVS, ptools), etc

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT: community interface for the Open-Sourcing of the FailSafe high-availability software system.

RECENT EXPERIENCE

Silicon Graphics Inc, Mountain View, CA (April 1997 - May 2003)

Individual Contributer, Engineering R&D organization. Most recent tasks first:

• Ported a large (~1500 files, 500000 LOC) cluster infrastructure product (mostly C and shell) from MIPS/IRIX to Linux/IA64 and to be network inter-operable. This software consists of a number of multi-threaded daemons, each communicating with other daemons on the same host, as well as the corresponding daemon on other hosts in the cluster. The major challenge was that most of the code was not designed to be network-byte-order aware, and this required learning the disparate communication structures of each layer to correct this problem.
• Architected and implemented the middleware layer of a next-generation server console and management station. This code implemented much of the policy (security, features, etc), and communicated between an existing GUI/security infrastructure and a new back-end management code (based upon VACM).
• Technical lead in the development, integration, and delivery of the IRIX 6.5.17 quarterly OS release. This involved working as part of the product team, communicating with other IRIX engineers throughout the company, doing code reviews of all parts of the IRIX deliverables (kernel, networking, graphics, etc) in all languages used (C, C++, shell, Perl, Java). It also included triaging build problems, etc.
• Technical lead and primary community liason for the open-sourcing of Linux FailSafe (basic high-availability portion only of IRIS FailSafe). Remained community liason even after SGI terminated it's technical involvement.
• Architecture and design team member for a Cluster Infrastructure/Distributed Shared Memory R&D project, using Linux as the implementation platform. Developed the kernel interface portion, implemented as a user-mode filesystem. The project ended without a product.
• Member of a team defining a "server appliance" product, which never completed.
• Major contributor to the RoboInst product, a tool to enable large-scale automated installation and updates of IRIX systems. I re-wrote the networking portion, and wrote much of the documentation and all of the examples.
• Ongoing support of Perl as a part of IRIX.

Silicon Graphics Inc, Mountain View, CA (May 1988 - April 1997)

I/S Engineer, Corporate I/S organization. The major projects that I remember include (in rougly chronological order, though many overlapped in time):

• Member of the first next-generation database evaluation team.
• Database expert for a financial database consistency repair project. I had the first MIPS/IRIX machine in I/S.
• Engineered and deployed several generations of dialup and remote access systems. I evaluated hardware, wrote software and documentation, part of which evolved into the SLIP and PPP configuration and troubleshooting on IRIX pages.
• Started SGI's internal corporate web as a better way to distribute information and documentation to employees. The initial rollout was before Jim Clark left SGI to found Netscape. It included porting and packaging the NCSA server and the Mosaic browser for internal use.
• Started the first version of what eventually became the current "Freeware Project", with inst-packaged ports of Perl, Emacs, and xntpd.
• Took over and finished the combined online/printed corporate internal phonebook process (written in Perl).
• Core member of a team to create an internal cryptographic-based security infrastructure. It was planned to include smart-cards, CAs, etc. I was an integral part of the architecture, design, and implementation phases, coding in C (including a Perl5 API), and was intended to run on IRIX, MacOS and Microsoft Windows, though all development was done on IRIX. I also ran the source tree and build process, mostly coded in Perl. We also performed several security audits of critical corporate databases and procedures. Very cool project, ahead of it's time, abandoned due to upper management turmoil...

Some Forgotten Failed Startup (Santa Clara, CA), and contracting (Oct 1987 - May 1988)

A get-out-of-military-contracting job. I learned database and user-interface design. I used the Unify database and tools, and C on various Unix versions.

TRW, Redondo Beach, CA. (1981-1987)

Technical lead and system architect for a series of simulation software deliveries for the Air Force. The software was written in a structured FORTRAN pre-processor on VMS. I evaluated changing to the then-new language Ada, and recommended against it at that time.

This was a Classified environment, and I had a security clearance.

EDUCATION

• B.S. Physics 1977, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA. majored in Astrophysics and numerical simulation.
• no degree, PhD physics program, UCSB 1977-79
• various dates: work-sponsored classes in object oriented design, Ada, SQL database, C++, Java.

REFERENCES