Professional Profile

Over 20 years' experience as a Computer Professional with skills in software design, development, programming, troubleshooting and training in a wide variety of software and hardware environments. Thrives in a challenging environment and quickly adapts to new situations. Well-developed communication and problem-solving skills with the ability to resolve difficult situations under adverse conditions.

Professional Experience

Confidential- Developer

• Worked as part of a team developing a Groovy/Grails application providing health care / insurance plan, benefit, and cost information. Both end user web interfaces using Grails gsp's and Service type information XML Json for client insurance companies were implemented. Utilized both MySQL Mongo backend databases, and made extensive use of JQuery on the front end.
• Used Spock, JMeter, and Selenium for unit, integration, and performance testing.
• Eclipse was used as the development IDE with Subversion for version control Jenkins as a CI platform.
• Work was done in a Rally based agile environment.

Confidential Contractor

• As part of a team working for the Department of Energy, developed a web application with the server written in Groovy/Grails and client side in HTML/CSS/JavaScript using the ExtJS framework. Worked with other developers in determining best practices coding standards for both the Groovy/Grails ExtJS technologies, new to us at the time.
• Coded maintenance and enhancements including Junit tests to a medium size 10k LOC Java Swing based application.
• Wrote fixes for an old Borland C application.
• Helped with setup administration of a Jenkins continuous integration environment.

Confidential Consultant

Development programming for a large J2EE based Medical information web hosted application. Application hosted in Apache/Tomcat with extensive use of Servlets JSPs, using the Struts framework, and with a Postgresql database on the back end. The application performs extensive processing of XML documents using the XPath framework and other XML technologies.

Confidential Consultant

• Transitioned the company from Windows based file sharing and user authentication services to the use of Samba running on Linux.
• Moved users from Microsoft Exchange to Kerio Mail Server on the Linux systems.
• Setup on-site and remote backup procedures and systems.
• Setup use of SSH for secure connections from outside PC's.
• Acted as the Unix System Administrator including writing various utility scripts in shell script, Perl.
• Wrote documentation and trained users on all of the above.

Confidential Senior Developer

• In charge of QA, testing and integration for the EMC Global Services project. This project of about ten people used Agile development technology and involved continuous client interaction on my part.
• Developed Documentum Forms and supporting DFC Documentum Foundation Classes Java code for data entry / repository integration.
• Worked in introducing a new XML based application development environment xfy from Just Systems to the company and created an application demonstrating the product capabilities. This involved extensive work with XML schema and XSLT based transformations.
• For our Informa project developed further DFC Java code and, when we needed to create several 10,000 plus line XML configuration files, developed a Python based templating system allowing for straight-forward future modifications.

Confidential Technical Architect

• When the IBM Java environment was causing a number of business critical applications to fail with memory problems, led the effort to identify and fix the application specific issues, resulting in significant improvements in application stability and reliability. Applications that needed rebooting several times a day now run full time or at worst need scheduled off-hour reboots. Trained diverse user groups in the proper use of IBM Java related diagnostic tools and monitoring facilities.
• Learned Tomcat and JBoss J2EE platforms and moved a number of applications from the older Sun platforms to the new AIX systems.
• Provided third level support to users in Perl and shell scripting, ssh configuration, database Oracle connectivity issues and other technical issues.

Confidential - Systems Architect

• Designed, programmed and brought into production a database driven system to deal with the massive quantities of paperwork associated with real-estate closings and other transactions. Microsoft Word on the client desktops used VBA code to retrieve and format data from the host UniData database, using the SOAP protocol as the communications format with Jakarta Tomcat on the host as middleware for the interchange.
• Spearheaded transition from the old dumb terminal character based applications to a GUI browser based interface while retaining as much as possible of the business logic code from the older system.
• Wrote numerous utilities and routines in support of applications development and trained new employees in various topics including the UniData database, basics of XML and use of the Unix command line.
• Collaborated with other staff members in the implementation of Linux hosted email and fax servers, and integration into the AIX based database system.

Confidential Unix System Administrator

• Played a key role in Server Consolidation and Disk Consolidation projects in which multiple Unix servers were replaced by Sun E10000 Starfire Enterprise servers and scattered disk resources were replaced by large EMC Symmetrix networked storage systems.
• As the primary administrator of the EMC systems, monitored system availability, maintenance scheduling and capacity planning. Developed a number of Perl scripts to aid in their management, and began to work on a management system written in Java.
• Western Gas Resources
• As the Unix and Database administrator responsibilities included installation of operating systems and database software, applications development software, support and training of programming staff and serving as a general resource to programmers for problems not within the scope of simple applications development, especially those related to system interconnectivity.
• Led company transition from PRIME minicomputers to HP Unix systems. Developed standards and procedures for the new systems and automating procedures for transferring the database to new systems.
• Designed and wrote system used to manage all gas meter measurement data and make that data available to users throughout the company. System was generally acknowledged as one of the most flexible and user friendly of the in-house developed projects and stayed in use for more than 12 years.

Technical Skills