March, 2009, to date
Owner, President, and Principal Consultant: ArdenTex, Inc.
25 Walnel Dr., Royersford, PA 19468
Current Contracts
June, 2010, to date
Independent Consultant, Hozzle Rocket, LLC, 1123 Ashbridge Dr., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010Hozzle Rocket is developing a web-enabled, subscription-based site for customers with multiple residences. The software is developed using Ruby on Rails, with a jQuery-based user interface. As a consultant to Hozzle Rocket, I am helping to design and build the final system.
July, 2011, to date
Independent Consultant, JMV Services, Inc.'s ITS Property and Casualty Consulting subsidiary, 17950 Preston Rd., Suite 750, Dallas, TX 75379I am building a back-end Java library to convert insurance business data objects to XML, via XMLBeans-created classes. This API is to be integrated into the Talend data processing (ETL) tool, allowing efficient processing of insurance data.
July, 2011, to date
Independent Consultant, Orocast, LLC, Berwyn, PAOrocast is a startup, developing a web- and smart-phone-based service. (A non-disclosure agreement prevents my disclosing the exact nature of the service.) With another consultant, I'm involved in the design of the system; my development work is currently focused on the back-end, Ruby on Rails services layer.
March, 2011, to date
Independent Consultant, Alphabuyer, LLC., 1410 Russell Rd., Suite 102, Paoli, PA 19301Alphabuyer is a consumer group-buying site, currently focused on the energy market. I have been contracted to help debug and enhance their Python- and Django-based software application.
Past Contracts
August, 2010
Independent Consultant, Dow Jones & Co., 4300 Route 1 North, Monmouth Junction, NJ 08852Made custom enhancements to my curn open source RSS reader, which Dow Jones uses internally.
February, 2011 to May, 2011
Independent Consultant, QAD, Inc., 100 Innovation Place, Santa Barbara, CA 93108Contracted to address some performance problems and correct some other defects in the product I originally helped to develop for FullTilt Solutions.
February, 2010
Independent Consultant, Technology Co-Pilot, LLC, 6743 E. Tyndall Circle, Mesa, Arizona 85215Technology CoPilot provides custom integration and software development for, among other things, the Stone Edge Order Manager ecommerce order management software suite. I have done some integration work for Technology CoPilot, mostly PHP/Linux-based.
March, 2009, to February, 2011
Independent Consultant, SDI Health, LLC, 220 West Germantown Pike, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462SDI Health provides health care data solutions and analytics to various companies in the health care business space.
My duties, as an independent consultant for SDI, included:
- Tuning and reverse-engineering existing legacy systems
- Designing and implementing new data normalization software
- Participating in the rearchitecture of the internal data warehouse
- Providing software technical advice and direction
The data warehouse rearchitecture effort requires consuming, normalizing, mastering and maintaining millions of rows of health care-related data records from disparate sources, using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Oracle, PL/SQL and custom components.
This was a 40-hour-a-week contract.
February, 2008, to March, 2009
Senior Software Engineer
Invite Media, Inc., 1716 Chestnut Street, Suite 4, Philadelphia, PA 19103 ** (Acquired by Google in June, 2010)
Invite Media builds technology and provides network services to facilitate Internet optimized advertising. I was a senior developer of a small team that was responsible for specification, design, and implementation of large-scale, real-time, advertising bidding engine and ad server. The system was written primarily in Python with some components in Java.
Technologies and techniques used included:
- Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) services
- Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3)
- The Hadoop map/reduce framework
- The Twisted Python framework
- The RabbitMQ messaging framework
- PostgreSQL
- Django
- SQLAlchemy
June, 1999, to February, 2008
Enterprise Architect / Senior Developer
FullTilt Solutions, Inc., (acquired by QAD, Inc. in 2008),
1400 Liberty Ridge Drive, Suite 100, Wayne, PA 19087
I was one of a handful of senior-level developers of the FullTilt Perfect Product Suite product information management tool. We developed a business-to-business ecommerce product that streamlined the maintenance of product data. The product embodied a work flow process that enabled a company to process, classify, attribute, search, maintain, and deploy large volumes of product data, while minimizing the need for data entry personnel. The product's server-side software was written entirely in Java. Perfect Product Suite's user interfaces consisted of browser-based HTML screens that interacted with server-side Java servlets.
Perfect Product Suite is patented; I am listed as a co-inventor.
As a senior developer, my duties included architecture, design, development, and, occasionally, sales support. I worked on every component of Perfect Product Suite, including:
- the UIs and servlets
- the database API, a proprietary ORM
- the utility library
- the proprietary back-end Import Manager process that automatically classified and processed imported product data
- the XML parsing engine
In March, 2007, I assumed the position of Enterprise Architect, putting me in charge of the overall architectural direction of the product.
April, 1997 to June, 1999
Senior Architect / Senior Software Developer
PLATINUM technology International, inc., (acquired by Computer Associates in 1999), Three Valley Square, 512 Township Line Road, Suite 300, Blue Bell, PA 19422
One of two architects responsible for overall design of PLATINUM's Open Enterprise Management System (POEMS), a unified infrastructure into which all PLATINUM products were integrating, to provide seamless operation, administration, and look-and-feel across the PLATINUM product line. The components were written in C and ran on Microsoft Windows NT and multiple versions of Unix.
October, 1993, to April, 1997
Senior Member of Engineering Staff
N2K Inc., 435 Devon Park Drive, Suite 600, Wayne, PA 19087-1943
Senior developer, computer security professional, and internal staff consultant for N2K Inc, an Internet-oriented entertainment company and an on-line music retailer that ultimately merged with CDNow. During my tenure at N2K, my duties included:
- Designing and implementing a UNIX development environment.
- Designing and implementing a UNIX-based corporate firewall.
- Building and maintaining an in-house C++ utility library.
- Designing and implementing a C++ network-based server to field credit card transactions and forward them through Visa-supplied hardware to a clearing bank.
- Building a C++ command shell, using lex and yacc for a proprietary full-text database system.
- Designing and partially implementing an NFS proxy to permit tunneling NFS traffic safely from behind the corporate firewall to machines in the firewall's DMZ.
- Filling in for and training our Unix system administrators.
February, 1991, to October, 1993
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Tangram Enterprise Solutions (formerly, Rabbit Software Corp.), 7 Great Valley Parkway, Malvern, PA 19355
Senior developer and team leader for Rabbit Software, a small company that developed PC-based SNA networking software, primarily for the UNIX, DOS and Windows environments.
February, 1990, to February, 1991
Computer Scientist
Naval Air Development Center (now the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, MD), Warminster, PA 18974-5000
Senior developer and researcher for a department that focused primarily on defining, standardizing and building software engineering environments.
February, 1989, to February, 1990
Navy Resident Affiliate
Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
Selected to serve as NADC's Resident Affiliate to the SEI for one year. Served primarily as a Navy representative on the User Interface Prototyping Project, helping to build a UNIX-based user interface management system (UIMS) called Serpent.
May, 1985, to February, 1989
Computer Scientist
Naval Air Development Center (now the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, MD), Warminster, PA 18974-5000
I initially served as a principal member of a team who developed a software engineering environment for System V UNIX.
I also served as system manager for a network of UNIX-based workstations.
May, 1983, to May, 1985
Programmer/Analyst
Financial Automation Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, 1900 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103
Member of the technical staff responsible for maintaining and developing on-line trading system software.
January, 1983, to May, 1983
Adjunct Instructor
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122
As an undergraduate, I taught an introductory Fortran programming course in the College of Engineering.
Bass, L., Clapper, B., Hardy, E., Kazman, R., Seacord, R. The Serpent User Interface Management System. Proceedings of the 1990 USENIX Technical Conference.
Co-inventor: US Patent #6,668,254, Method and system for importing data. (Also patented in Europe, patent number EP1227411).
Languages: Java, Scala, Javascript, CoffeeScript, C++, C, C#, various assemblers, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, all UNIX shells, HTML, XML, SQL, Emacs LISP
Frameworks: Spring, Django, Ruby on Rails, J2EE
Miscellaneous Tools: Subversion, Git
Cloud computing and related technologies: Google App Engine, Amazon EC2
RDBMS-related technologies: Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Hibernate, Django (ORM), SQLAlchemy, Squeryl, ScalaQuery, ActiveRecord, Microsoft SSIS (including writing custom components)
Operating Systems: Most flavors of UNIX (including Solaris, HP/UX, AIX; Open Source operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux); Mac OS X; Windows
B.A., Computer and Information Sciences, May, 1983 (Magna Cum Laude)
Temple University, Philadelphia, PAElected to Phi Beta Kappa in April, 1983