Michael "Mike" S. Email & Phone Number

Kirkland, Wa, Us

I lead a group of five volunteer software developers working to enhance the experience for participants at club events, which often are in remote locations. Orienteering races typically use individual starts at 1 or 2 minute intervals instead of mass starts. As such, it is difficult during the event to determine interim individual results. Our goals include:● presenting ongoing results in near real time via on-site WiFi● calculating (and recalculating) on-the-fly team standings (when relevant)● providing meet staff with operational data (number of starts, who is still out, etc.)Our (hard) deliverable date was February 21, 2015 - our school league championship.We deployed a fully functional system at the club's February 7th event, and at the championship the system worked flawlessly and was very popular with the participants and their friends and families. During the 2015-2016 season we provided WiFi results at all meets, enhancing reliability and functionality (eg. more detailed team results). We extended the system to post live updates to the club's website during the NJROTC National Orienteering Championship Invitational meet (March 5-6, 2016) and this, too, was a popular success.Future projects under consideration:● extending the club website as a mobile app (in coordination with the Web Team)● "geeking up" our permanent courses with another mobile app● live, remote video at our events (i.e., cameras on the course, watch the action via WiFi)● anything, actually, that sounds like fun and affords us an opportunity to learn somethingMore on the sport and the club at http://www.cascadeoc.org

Kirkland, Wa, Us

I conduct field surveys for orienteering maps and then draft them. My recent maps have been used for three US championships, several regional championships, and a World Ranking Event; each event attracted over 300 participants from throughout the region and even from overseas. My work has been praised by top elite competitors and by highly regarded American and Canadian mappers.I have produced or updated maps in Alberta and the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Louisiana, and have been invited to work on maps in Alaska and British Columbia, the latter for another World Ranking Event.This is intermittent work and varies from occasional weekends to full-time, 7 days per week. My undergraduate studies in geological mapping and my later experience with civil engineering surveying have contributed to my success as a mapper.Participants at orienteering meets depend on the maps for information which they use to choose and follow routes from one control ("checkpoint") through the terrain to the next. Recognizing this - and respecting that some participants will have traveled a long ways to the event - I work really hard to ensure that my maps are correct, consistent, and legible. Attention to detail!I completed five projects (ranging from minor updates to completely new maps) during the fall and winter of 2015-2016; two of these maps were used for championships. During the winter 2022-23 I updated the map for the 2023 Winter League Championship, another National Ranking Event.In addition to mapping, I enjoy writing. This page contains a well-received writeup for a new map: https://web.archive.org/web/20151107141832/http://www.cascadeoc.org:80/venues/camp-river-ranchEnjoy.Relevant skills: field surveying, graphic design and layout, cartography

Kirkland, Wa, Us

Webmaster for Washington Interscholastic Orienteering League (www.wiol.org), serving hundreds of students in the Puget Sound region. I was responsible for all aspects of the site, from design through implementation. Among many other accomplishments, I created the individual and team scoring system for the league, tracking ~300 middle school and high school participants through each season. It took just a few seconds to update the standings after the results data is available - a vast improvement over the manual system I replaced (a change in the software used to capture the raw results data meant a more verbose data interchange format - XML - and the processing time is now a couple of minutes).I have since passed the responsibility on to other club members and the WIOL results are now a part of the club's main web site.WIOL is is operated by Cascade Orienteering Club, a 501(c)3 organization in Seattle. I have been an active contributor to the league since its inception.

Seattle, Wa, Us

I helped support internal customers as part of two teams of on call front-line staff by resolving trouble tickets or forwarding them to teams that can. I also contributed to the continual process of updating the database describing how packages may move through Amazon's transportation network. Other tasks included developing and improving SOPs and related documents.

Seattle, Wa, Us

As a TA I preformed trailer moves, interacted with third party drivers, helped manage the trailer yard in cooperation with inside Operations staff, and mentored new TAs. I also developed and documented several proposed process improvements.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Contributed to the steady flow of packages from trailers, through the sorting process, and onto trailers.

Part of a small team that tested SMB/CIFS and other protocol stacks in OneFS - software for large storage systems. Wrote scripts (mostly in Python but also Perl and bash) to automate tests and report their results, cutting analysis time from several minutes to effectively zero. Primarily used virtual machines for testing (à la VMWare); software tools included Jenkins.

Seattle, Washington, Us

Software developer writing Python (which I had to learn on the run) and shell scripts to scrape web pages. I automated the collection of nearly two million data records, a process that ran in parallel across multiple distributed machines, mostly unattended. These records were stored in MySQL and I wrote scripts that then presented the contents of these records to language specialists. Using Mako (which I enhanced for our purposes), I also created prototypes of public facing web pages of this data.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Primarily Perl (and some shell and C) for performance and functional testing. This included mathematical analysis of performance issues. I designed and built (or modified) test systems to measure firewall throughput and verify performance and functionality.

Perl, shell scripts, and C for monitoring and managing systems distributed throughout the world. This role was more a "systems engineer" than "software engineer". I developed code and processes to monitor, alert, and repair system failures. One such shell script automated the response to failed backup jobs and reduced late-night pages by one third. I also created tools to update several hundred systems scattered around the world, an interesting challenge as the systems were turned off at "night" - which, of course, varied by location. Another task was designing and creating the user interfaces (web based) to a database containing operational and configuration information about all of Airborne's distributed systems.Airborne was acquired by DHL in 2003 and the Seattle corporate headquarters was closed in 2004.

Project Manager and developer for an e-mail to fax application, supervising and mentoring two junior developers. Had total responsibility for all technical aspects of the product. Early in my tenure, I reduced the failure rate by a third, and then worked to reduce it further along with reducing latency. Solved several operational issues, including one deemed an irreparable disaster by management (very short summary: no messages were lost, meaning no lost revenue).

Member of the team that processed the first wireless E9-1-1 call in the US.SysAdmin (Solaris) and general problem solver. Used Perl, C, shell scripts and a "think outside of the box", "challenge all assumptions", and "understand the behavior" approach to determine root causes of problems (I solved several that had stumped others).This position was one of the best "fits" for me in my career - diverse challenges that exercised my analytical skills.XYPOINT was acquired by TeleCommunication Systems, Inc. in 2001.

SysAdmin for a 20+ Sun systems; installing new systems and updating/patching existing ones. Solved several operational issues, taught UNIX command usage to non-tech savvy staff, wrote monitoring tools, installed NTP on all systems.

Writing programs (in C) for testing the control software for trunking radio systems.Also, I was responsible for the configuration management tasks (including builds) for a group of ~25 developers. In this role I automated much of the routine update process, effecting about a six-fold improvement in speed, as well as the build process itself. This latter effort improved the robustness and visibility of the process.

Software engineer developing firmware emulator in C and M68K assembler.

Bs Geological Engineering, Engineering Geology

Master Of Software Engineering, Software Engineering