Ed Puckett Email and Phone Number

Developed backend code for the popular MMORTS (massively multiplayer online real-time strategy) game Dragons of Atlantis, one of the showcase products for Kabam.Environment: clustered, mysql, redis, memcached, Ruby on Rails, git* Interfaced with producers* Interfaced with technical operations* Responsible for tuning the transaction engine at the heart of gameplay* Solved some technical issues that had impaired scaling* Speciality: zero-defect deployments

I worked on a series of contracts for the UC Davis Geology Department which owns a sophisticated virtual reality system (a Fakespace 4-sided CAVE), producing the following:* VNC (Virtual Network Computing, i.e., remote desktop) component for the VRUI system developed by UC Davis. The VNCTool creates connections from within the virtual environment to external computers and provides, among other things, a convenient way for researchers to beam data out of the virtual environment. The remote computer’s desktop is texture mapped onto a slate within the virtual environment.* Python bindings for VRUI. I used Py++ as the code generator, but I had to solve the problem of object ownership. VRUI, written in C++ and therefore without garbage collection, expects that an object that is passed into certain of its functions remain live after the function call returns, i.e., the function is responsible for the cleanup of the object. Py++‘s bindings are generated for Boost.Python which assumes that when a wrapped C++ object’s Python refcount hits zero, the C++ object should be deleted. In other words, the Python wrapper owns the underlying C++ object. However, if an object is created in Python and then passed to VRUI, the ownership relationship must be reversed. Another issue was with callback objects: their arguments are declared with the most general type to be accepted but when actually called they need to be wrapped for their more-specific actual type so that all the nuances of that type are available.* Python bindings for the Bullet Physics Libraries that perform collision detection, and simulate rigid body and soft body dynamics in 3D. Performance was important.A prototype 3D user interface based on Bullet.* Microsoft Kinect integration for both head-tracking (for correct view) and gesture recognition (for input) on small VR systems. This will replace an expensive, hard-to-install, hard-to-configure multi-camera system.

With my partners from Searchbuilder and a colleague from Montana, designed and implemented a novel technique for monitoring previously unmonitorable gambling machines in Montana. Using Hall-effect sensors, we were able to gather play data from any gambling machine, even those without any monitoring built-in. In addition, we developed a system that aggregates all such data from a casino, and provides accounting, auditing, and player tracking services to the casino operator. In February of 2003, we presented a plan to the State of Montana for solving their long-standing problem of gathering gambling machine taxation data state-wide. The demo went very well, but we were unfortunately unaware of some political issues that had doomed our project from the outset.

Designed and directed the implementation of systems for gathering search engine data, and for submitting, monitoring, and analyzing the performance of search engine placements made for our customers. The placement tracking system we developed managed a half terabyte of data and provided real-time performance analysis for our clients' placements. I developed the technology for our e-commerce site whereby clients would sign up, pay for, maintain, and monitor their placements in a completely automated fashion. Lastly, I developed a unique server architecture by which our customers' credit card information was kept safe from network-based (not physical) attacks while at the same time being usable in a real-time fashion.

Reflective Genetics is engaged in research and development of next-generation metalevel programming languages and systems. The goal is to design a reflective language that blends the abstraction and simplicity of Lisp with the performance of C. The main result (so far?) is that class instantiation can be seen as compilation, so that compile-time and run-time are blended together. Metaclasses (which can be thought of as adjectives, e.g, thread-safe), mixing in a new metaclass to an existing class will cause recompilation. The compiler is part of the runtime, and is called instantiation. I created a language named IMPL that embodies this concept plus the concept of progressive instantiation reminiscent of Java inner classes.

Integrated the Web browser that we developed at BookLink into the AOL client software, thereby establishing AOL as the first online service with fully integrated Internet access. Later, when AOL executed a browser agreement with Microsoft, I spent 3 months onsite at Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer into the AOL client software, and became the technical liaison for further talks between AOL and Microsoft. I also evaluated new technologies from external companies for possible acquisition by AOL, and was one of AOL’s main W3C representatives. In 1997 I was named one of the first six AOL Fellows.

Cofounder of BookLink, Inc., an early Web browser company. BookLink was the first wholly- owned subsidiary formed after the IPO of CMG (now CMGi). After 9 months, we sold BookLink to AOL for $37.5 million, becoming the first big acquisition of the Internet era. At BookLink, I was the chief software developer, and responsible for the design of all software and for setting the technical standards for the company. The platform target was Windows 3.1 which had no threads. I devised a system I called continuations, based on the concept of continuation-passing-style programming. This permitted us to write asynchronous code in a natural way, and provided a cooperatively multitasked thread-like system. This was all implemented in C++ with C preprocessor macros to simplify usage. Our other distinguishing feature is that we were embeddable, either as an OLE Custom Control, or simply as a Window Handle. This was one of the main reasons we were acquired by AOL: none of the other browsers at the time could do this.

Technical lead on the Interleaf 5 for Windows NT project. During that time, I developed a Windows/DOS interprocess communication VxD (Windows Virtual Device) utilized by Interleaf 5 for DOS which, as its name implies, ran on DOS. This was the Windows 3.1 era, so DOS processes actually ran, preemptively multitasked, in their own virtual machine on Windows whereas Windows processes were cooperatively multitasked all within their single VM. My VxD facilitated Interleaf’s integration into the Windows environment in two ways: data communication between Interleaf and other Windows processes, and, more importantly, I could signal our video driver just before losing and just before gaining execution focus so that it could save and restore its state. I also contributed to the Interleaf 5 for Windows project.

Maintained and added significant enhancements to PSAAS, an airline passenger services dynamic resource scheduling system developed by Addax. I performed PSAAS installations in the U.S. and Europe for American Airlines, British Airways, KLM and Lufthansa. PSAAS was developed for PCs on Novell networks using Microsoft Pascal as the programming language.