At The MathWorks I have been involved with the exploration and adoption of new technology for product development both within MATLAB and in new cloud based SaaS offerings. My projects have included SaaS services that enable MATLAB to run in a browser with a custom cloud based file-system (similar to Dropbox for MATLAB users), support MOOCs via a stateless service that runs MATLAB code (similar to AWS Lambda for MATLAB code) and enable Internet of Things (IoT) applications using WebSockets and access to MathWorks products where ever they are (similar to GoToMyPc for MATLAB). More specifically I have helped multiple teams understand the suitability of Micro Services architectures, OSGi, Spring, Java EE as well as Cloud Computing (Amazon Web Services), Scala, Akka and the Playframework. My role involves research and evaluation of technology alternatives, development of architectural spikes, evolutionary prototypes and then the adoption of designs and technology within product offerings by designing and developing key elements of the application. This process typically culminates with my coaching team members through the development and adoption process. This technology leadership has extended through the development of supporting processes such as applying architectural agile modeling techniques in a Scrum environment to assembling and adopting infrastructure such as build and test systems, e.g. sbt, Maven & TeamCity. Recently I have also led the adoption of Scala, Akka and the Play Framework for use within our SaaS offerings.

As a Principal Software Architect at Granite Systems I was responsible for the fundamental definition and direction of the three projects I lead. The last one, the Granite Automation Platform (GAP) sought to leverage Open Source Software from JBoss including jbpm, drools and hibernate as well as the Eclipse IDE and dynamic languages including Groovy. GAP sought to combine the productivity enhancements that derive from projects like “Ruby on Rails” (RoR) and Grails (Groovy on Rails) with traditional enterprise computing facilities such as a workflow and a rules engines. In GAP this new capability was to extend the value of the company's core asset, the Granite Inventory System (Xng) by providing a highly productive enterprise integration and automation environment. At Granite, I lead teams of contributors ranging from 2 to 10 engineers. My involvement was from product conception and initial requirements discussion with customers, research into technology and solution development (which included writing production code) through roll-out and production support. Other projects I have directed include: WebTK: a JavaServer Faces (JSF) based toolkit of components that allow for Rapid Application Development (by leveraging the capabilities of Sun's Creator).Operational Process Interface: a single sign-on facility for Granite Inventory applications including a Swing based “rich client” as well as JSP/JSF based applications and WebServices.

I initially joined Silknet as a Principal Architect reporting to the CTO where I assisted with the definition of the architecture of the eBusiness Platform and the Customer Care Center, a call center application based on J2EE that was ultimately adopted by Cisco, Sprint, GE Capital, Blue Cross Blue Shield, eTrade, Yahoo! and others. In my initial role I researched J2EE technology, wrote initial implementations of key services and worked with engineers to assist the team in the adoption of what was at the time “bleeding edge” technology. In the development of the eBusiness Platform we developed a Service Oriented Architecture based on EJB Services, HTTP and XML and JMS in 1999, well before the standardization of WebServices, WSDL and enterprise Service Oriented Architectures. Subsequently, I went on to become the Director of Platform Architecture where I interacted with executive level customers and presented to senior technical teams ranging from financial and health care institutions, to some of the biggest names on the Internet. As part of the rapidly evolving Internet era, I was also involved in a number of merger and acquisition activities including due diligence from both the “acquirer” and “acquiree” perspectives. Finally, as part of the difficult “dot com bust” era, I helped define and implement a development process to support the off shoring many engineering functions to partners including: Accenture, IBM and HCL in India (Chennai & Bangalore) and China (Shanghai).

I joined PSDI (now the MRO division of IBM) as they formed their Java/Internet Development team. I helped form the team and was responsible for architecting the Application Server at the heart of their Internet enabling effort. At this point in time, there were no commercial application servers, PSDI was an early adopter of Java technology and when we began, we were still using Java 1.0 as the basis for our development, it was clearly a case of “bleeding edge” development during a time of evolving standards and technology (the term J2EE had not yet been coined and when we began there was no EJB or Servlet standards). Our fundamental challenge was to develop a single architecture that would allow the company to profitably support small, single server installations and yet scale to the enterprise class application with thousands of simultaneous users that United Parcel Service (UPS) and other large customers required. We successfully accomplished this goal through careful evaluation of the “build vs. buy” equation and building key elements of the architecture internally thereby giving us remarkable control over our cost of goods sold and our deployment scenarios.

I assisted High Tech Ventures as they adopted Web Technologies and applied them to their recruiting practice.

The multi-threaded 4GL which I assumed responsibility for was specifically designed for use in a heterogeneous distributed application environment centered around a proprietary message bus. This system was created well in advance of Java, yet there are many parallels that can be drawn to Java and the way we addressed similar requirements. Project work included the optimization of the runtime engine that resulted in a 10x performance improvement for aspects of the language and the specification and implementation of a compiler for the language where I was was able to achieve a 20x reduction in the number of lines of code from a previous implementation as well as extend the language to support Unicode and Asian languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. One of the last projects I worked on at FASTech was a CGI application that allowed the remote monitoring and control of factory applications based on FASTech's distributed message bus, the MBX. This allowed Web based applications and users to interact with FASTech's proprietary application components.

I led a team of 7 engineers which developed a data collection and real-time equipment status display application for a network of workstations, intelligent devices and personal computers on an Intranet. The application included a user interface specification language based on a lex/yacc lexer/parser that resulted in interactive UIs for the system (note: this was well before HTML and the commercial Internet existed!). All the equipment and workstations communicated with TCP/IP and socket level communications as well as NFS (note: this was also prior to the existence of HTTP).

The system I created was a piece of process control equipment for the paper manufacturing industry. My responsibilities included working with applications engineers & marketing to develop a product specification and then as the principal engineer on the team, implement it. I also developed support for a legacy solution running on new custom developed hardware. Finally, as part of this project I introduced source code control and automated testing of the software.

The system I developed for Rapid Thermal Annealing of semiconductor wafers required the development of software for:real-time control for a 3 axis wafer handling robot;user interlace with graphical machine state representation and recipe management software (GUI Design)Serial protocol to support communications between 5 special purpose loosely coupled microprocessors Because of the nature of a startup, I also worked with marketing, applications process engineers and customers to develop specifications for this startup's first and second products. My software principally consisted of Forth and Assembler code burned in “proms” to control the 6 microprocessors that comprised the machines distributed control system. The subsystems I wrote included the network protocol, robotic control, user interface and real-time closed loop process control.

PT Analytical was the first startup I joined as I followed the team of engineers that I had worked with at Instrumentation Laboratories. In less than two years, we went from developing our designs in a hotel room to a 50,000 square foot manufacturing facility and ultimately acquisition by another company. The products were analytical instrumentation for chemical analysis and plasma etching end point detection based on Atomic Absorption and Emission Spectroscopy. Key innovations included the migration from manual gauges, knobs and dials to a digital control system where graphical depiction of key parameters on a computer screen was the only input or output. My responsibilities included the development of graphic user interfaces, real-time control of electro-mechanical and optical systems as well as the development of a communications protocol for the networked collection of microcontrollers and processors running the system.