Michael works on a small agile team doing full-stack development of the company’s flagship financial application. The tech stack includes Meteor (React, Bootstrap, MongoDB), and a private Ethereum-based blockchain.

Current product: A better Trader automated algorithmic stock trading

Cisco is networking. The Cisco ST&O Adaptation team positively impacts revenue in the US Public Sector by offering software engineering assistance to BUs to accelerate requests, prioritized by revenue. The team supports products for 3 months and then moves on to the next request.Michael and the Adaptation team enhanced several projects at Cisco.Cisco's flagship Unified Communications Manager (CUCM), a product that manages millions of VOIP calls around the world, required enhancement to add the Mobile Voice Access (MVA) feature, which allows a user to call in from a mobile phone and, after authenticating, spoof themselves as their desk phone. Michael added PIN validation and locale handling so that the language provided in prompts could be set to a phone-specific preference first, then a profile, and then a global default. He also scripted automated performance testing via hundreds of simultaneous calls.Virtual Telepresence Server (vTS), a part of Cisco's communications suite, has been used extensively for private communications. The team was tasked with enhancing it to meet Federal FEDRAMP certification. Michael worked on heartbeats, server log rotation, and secure remote logging, including logging of Windows and linux system logs to a secure central location using AWS CloudWatch. In addition, he worked with the team to provide auditing of any significant parameter change to the log.Ongoing education included a DevOps "unconference" where Michael led a session on optimized git workflows, OpenShift instruction on high-level management of Docker and Kubernetes containers, the application requirements for a best-practice microservice architecture, and constant learning in the areas of security, including the latest TLS ciphers and security risks.

(NOTE: Causam and Power Analytics (previous employer) are sister companies)Causam's mission is to create software for the emerging market in transactional energy. As the power grid becomes deregulated, decentralized and distributed, opportunities exist for smaller generators to disrupt the generation monopolies of existing utilities and feed energy back into the shared grid. Causam is a startup creating software to empower this transformation.The software that Michael helped architect, design, and implement includes a map-driven website based on leaflet and Play!, an AWS-enabled back end supporting high volumes of traffic, load balancing through haproxy and kafka, and nosql database support through mongodb and cassandra. In addition, meter data is securely ingressed from devices strategically distributed on the power grid.Michael established aggressive browser caching of versioned html, js, css, image assets. This included a Javascript tile caching mechanism for pans and zooms in the client map, following OpenStreetMap data tiling patterns, and a Scala backend to serve the tile assets by timestamp of the most recent change within the tile data. Michael also created an embedded device library in C that was pushed to a variety of small SoC devices. These devices could then monitor locally available meter data via http, modbus, etc. and push it to the backend servers. Data is buffered so that network outages will not affect SLA metering.

Power Analytics has two major offerings, Design Base and Paladin.Design Base allows electrical engineers to design the layout of the electrical systems of sites. It supports small industrial sites as well as large military sites, FAA facilities and data centers. Once the electrical sites are defined with one-lines, full electrical simulations can be run. Design Base is written in C++ and C# using Microsoft Visual Studio and an Autodesk library to handle the underlying CAD layouts. Widgets are placed on the CAD layout and electrically connected.Paladin takes the electrical models created and refined with DesignBase and adds realtime monitoring using metering devices at the site. It provides near-realtime live data, as well as the ability to create simulations. It supports many types of metering data ingress, and displays the data in customizable widgets made with SVG and javascript in layouts that can be designed to model the physical layout of the site. Paladin consists of a front end ASP.NET website called Design View, reporting tools that leverage Crystal Reports, and a backend supported by a meter gateway written in C# and C++, that uses a driver plugin system to ingress from many different meter sources.Michael was involved in the full development cycle of both products, from analysis and design to generating new widgets.Michael established an agile development process to manage the two teams, acting as scrum master for daily scrums and a JIRA-driven sprint cycle. Michael established continuous integration processes to enable regular production quality releases of both products. All software assets, many previously controlled by individual developers, were placed in a central shared repository, and on every commit, a semantic-versioned installation binary of the affected product was built. The new product release cycle resulted in stable, feature-filled, and profitable releases throughout Michael's tenure.

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions acquired the majority of IBM's point-of-sale business and now owns, develops and delivers the ACE SUREPOS point-of-sale systems to major corporations like Whole Foods, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond. The codebase has remained extremely stable throughout continuous expansion, via the use of a layering system based on templates, inheritance and factory patterns.Michael contributed to expanding features for several retailers while also managing the contributions of a remote team based in Bangalore, India. The Indian team did not have direct access to Toshiba's network. Michael provided training, prioritized and gave assignments, reviewed, corrected, and integrated contributions, performed lab testing, committed the code to Toshiba's code repository, and generally managed the team.

Michael is the technical lead on creating a real time integration between two major software systems at Progress Energy: Telvent's Distribution Management System (used for load flow analysis and smartgrid functionality) and ABB's Distribution Management System (used for outage management).The two systems are in production but not designed to communicate with each other directly, maintaining separate models of Progress Energy's electrical network. Telvent provides web services to programmatically access its DMS, and ABB's DMS is exposed through Oracle APIs. The following technologies are being used to integrate the disparate systems: .net web services, webMethods service bus providers and consumers, custom webMethods flow and Java services, perl web server exposing web services, Oracle stored procedures and triggers.

The NM-DMS department develops a graphical information system that allows management of large power utilities' electrical network distribution systems. The software not only manages customer calls, outages, crews, etc., but also maintains a three-phase energized representation of the electrical state of the network, including dynamic linecuts and jumperlines, near-realtime SCADA and AMI integration, and advanced powerflow analysis. Many major utilities in the U.S. and abroad are customers.Worked on several components of the product, lead developer for the CAD-like map display component. The map component was written in C++ using MFC and STL. In addition, Oracle OCI provided database storage and Tibco Smartsockets provided middleware pub/sub messaging.

R&D developed the CXFS Filesystem (aka “Charon”), a cross-platform distributed file system, to allow synchronization across the service provider's multiple locations. CXFS was first implemented as a Unix filesystem supporting Solaris, Linux, BSD, HPUX, etc.; Michael was involved in taking the filesystem to the Windows platform.

Accelerator developed a state-of-the-art application, designed from the ground up, to capture mining engineering expertise and provide results in easy-to-understand productivity reports.Minimal information from equipment manufacturers' simplified "glossy specification sheets" was expanded through reverse-engineering into a complete component-based simulation of the machine, using object-oriented modelingThe machine could then be driven on a virtual mine site to predict production and ownership and operating costsRigid and articulated haulers, loaders and other types of mining equipment were modeledModeled components included body, frame, engine, torque converter, gearing, linkage, tires including tread detail, soil, road profile, etc.Mining operation details were fed along with the wide number of variables involved into a Monte Carlo style simulation that produced clear easy-to-read productivity reportsEarlier work included development of software that used fluid mechanics to automatically size the plumbing of fire sprinkler piping, and proof-of-concept software to balance hauler and loader usage across a fleet, minimizing the equipment required for a given multiple-phase production schedule.