As always, I'm working on a mix of projects, some my own investments, some working with other organizations. I'm always looking for a worthy project. Good projects exercise my business and engineering management skills and satisfy my love of advancing science and technology or current interests in consumer product development.

I did this project to help people in need and because I like the technical, economic and marketing challenges of product development.Makers4Good employs 'makers' skills to meet pressing social needs by donating products to people in need as well as by donating profits from retail sales. I volunteer with Makers4Good to bring my first-tier management and technology development skills to this non-profit. I am key advisor to the founder and principal philanthropist on all aspects of the nonprofit’s planning and mission. I also directly engage in product development. I am a core manager of HELIO, a solar light and power source which is marketed to outdoor adventurers and is donated to people without electricity. I also initiated the concepts and guided the recorders4all product. A Kickstarter success, recorders4all gives kids with hand differences a low cost musical learning option.

Working on the Microelectronics executive team added an appreciation of costing risk and of managing very large development teams. In my eight years in Microelectronics we released eight SPARC processors and fourteen ASICs that went into hundreds of types of specialized servers for enterprise and cloud applications. As member of Oracle's Microelectronics Executive Staff and Director of New Technology Development I worked to move advanced technologies from research realms into products, driving down risk and improving future product generations. I also established and ran division-wide monthly engineering forums for all engineers worldwide, developed a wide variety of technical programs to feed product teams and coordinated various product engineering and corporate research programs. Responsibilities include cross organizational communications, engineering, research, legal, finance, and corporate compliance elements. Particular development programs included cloud data center design optimization, network storage technology hardware and software integration, server thermal management, memory systems, etceteras. To make these effective for the company my programs integrated hardware development with software optimizations backed by benchmarks and real world workload analysis. We worked hard to make sure my projects came in on time and below budget.

After the research was done it seemed important to extract the value out of it.I moved dozens of technologies from research into product development. These included software (Java, parallel languages, etc), data center management (virtualization, systems management) and hardware (chip I/O, power management, servers, storage, etc). I worked to maximize the ROI of Sun's prior investment in its HPCS DARPA research program. A large research portfolio had been amassed including (from top to bottom) data center job and systems control planes, virtualization engines, advanced data center networking, distributed storage systems, parallel programming languages (derived from a language range from traditional structured Fortran to Java and JVMs), massively NUMA parallel operating systems, massively multi-chip systems architectures, thermal management technologies, packaging technologies, chip-to-chip I/O technologies, and down to the foundry processes, many other things.

I brought management discipline to a large group of researchers so they could complete their projects. In return I got daily educations from experts in many disciplines. In their collective knowledge I got the better end by far.I was brought on to energize Sun's High Productivity Computing Systems Program, a $76M, 3 year DARPA research program that discovered and developed new technologies for HPC systems supporting strategically important government applications. Successfully brought the program execution to an accelerated schedule for completion in the remaining term. Working with the principal investigator and collective staff of 250 researchers, I delivered the technical objectives of the program and ensured the program operated in the financial and program management envelopes of the Government, Sun and the contract. We maximized the economic viability of the technology and the HPCS program concluded on schedule, on budget and delivering all milestones and technologies with advantage for Sun and the Government.

This was an opportunity to extend my interest in manufacturing to working with the dollars and cents of supply chain operations.g8 Solutions provided executive and supply chain management capabilities to small and mid-sized companies worldwide with emphasis on outsourcing and right-shoring. I co-founded the company and did the financial and operational systems. I also did sales and bid development and provided nominal management consulting services to g8 customers.

In an ode to Henry Ford (and a 1972 Nova) I still wanted to create flexible manufacturing systems with economies of scale efficiencies. I was able to create a company to drive that vision and in the process learned a great many thingsAPI develops advanced custom software applications, provides information technology management consulting and creates manufacturing software products. The company focused on a manufacturing software market niche and brought new manufacturing practices into commercial use. As a boutique vendor we successfully competed head-to-head with the offerings of major companies. We delivered value to our customers by combining deep knowledge of manufacturing and first tier computer science disciplines. The company was founded as a developer of robotic and CNC tool applications. Over time the software development extended from internet applications, enterprise applications, distributed network applications to stand alone industrial control systems. Because we took on uniquely challenging applications much of the software was custom. Being clever we delivered these custom systems for less than many packaged offerings. Over time we also developed some shrink-wrapped software products, notable the QFS manufacturing software product line. My functions included: corporate management and operations, sales and marketing, and a variety of project roles. I was intimately involved in the technical life of the company specifying and designing computer systems and software and actively managed many of the industrial automation and control systems projects. Built from scratch I (and we) created a team that did amazing things to further flexible manufacturing in the United States. In the post Dot-Com crash API reduced scale and returned to it's roots doing custom software. As part of those transitions I managed the successful succession to the company's current management.

Robots were the thing back then. GMF let me apply the technology I'd been working with to the real world of gritty industrial America.I was the technical liaison between the GMF robotic welding market group, GMF internal company R&D, university research programs and customers. I helped to ensure the successful application of new and advanced robotic and welding technologies in very mature markets and was instrumental in profitably bringing advanced automated technologies to mature industrial markets.

This was a first crack at being a software professional. It was a good combination of skills for a farm kid who liked to make things and who had a freshly minted degree.I created the company's first advanced robotic welding applications by combining sophisticated mathematical techniques, new mechanical and optical devices, traditional welding equipment and very primitive computation equipment to adaptively perform welding applications that previously had been done by hand. Interactions ranged from university and commercial research laboratories to end users in traditional industries.

On arrival at CMU I toured every research lab at the university. I wanted to work on the walking robots. I did that and many other things. In addition to making having a fun job, time with Ivan taught me fundamental business lessons I'd use often and introduced me to luminaries of the computer industry.As a walking robot research technician, I provided research and technical support for the consulting business working directly with principals Ivan Sutherland, Bert Sutherland, Bob Sproull and others.