Mark Vogt Email & Phone Number

Greater Atlanta Area

As a technical writing consultant, I developed and edited a range of internal and customer-facing documentation for multiple clients. Projects ranged from internal project overviews, information security policies, application programming interfaces, and internal support guides, to external user guides and customer support training materials.These required MS/Word, Visio, SnagIt, and Excel, with some Embarcadero Studio and MS/Project thrown in.

I served as the primary Japanese partner technical contact for HP-UX software, addressing technical and quality issues, liaising with R&D and support, and managing escalations. I also program managed HP-UX certifications and platform-dependent development projects for OEMs, and helped maintain a software development environment for them.High points:• Piloted an early access program for partner testing of HP-UX releases, avoiding late-breaking issues that could have delayed shipment.• Investigated and negotiated licensing agreements on Intel’s and HP’s source code, allowing our partners to investigate and resolve software problems.• Created MS/Project templates for certification programs and partner development projects to simplify tracking and transition.• Presented software quality metrics to international managers, receiving a 4.0 rating on a 5.0 scale.

I planned and developed documentation for HP-UX's Logical Volume Manager (LVM), the mass storage stack, and the Driver Development Kit (DDK). This included system administration guides, white papers, and release notes.On the side, I edited and posted over a dozen lab-written white papers, did usability review on man pages, and was called in to update the virtual partitions (vPars) administration guide and release notes.Two items I'm particularly proud of:• "When Good Disks Go Bad", a white paper on planning for, recognizing, and dealing with disk failure under LVM; for its first six months, it was one of the top 10 most downloaded documents on HP's customer documentation website. • "The Next Generation Mass Storage Stack", an overview white paper covering the 11i v3 rearchitecture of the HP-UX I/O stack; over 60 pages, it started as an introduction to the terminology and feature set, but grew to encompass all the new/changed commands and procedures in detail, affected subsystems, and migration.Both those white papers are attached below. Other high points:• Received a divisional “Better Together” award for serving on a cross-functional task force improving LVM supportability and reducing customer call load.• Designed, wrote, and maintained the HP-UX System Administrator’s Guide for LVM, streamlining the existing documentation set and incorporating best practices, error messages, and troubleshooting procedures.• Worked with two other engineers to update the HP-UX Driver Development Guide for the new I/O system, convert it from FrameMaker to XML, and consolidate the sources, cutting the time required for updates in half.

I developed and delivered training to HP-UX support engineers, R&D, and trainers, spanning system administration to troubleshooting to operating systems internals. Most was delivered over the web via virtual classroom, and included workbooks and lab exercises.Topics included:• Itanium (IA-64) processor architecture and assembly language, targeted toward a support and crashdump analysis audience. I received “excellent” reviews on the virtual classroom delivery.• VERITAS Volume Manager 3.1 internals, written from scratch without any lab documentation. It was designed to be included in the HP-UX operating systems internals class.• Virtual Partitions (vPars) troubleshooting.• HP-UX operating system updates.

I investigated and resolved customer problems for the HP-UX kernel, commands, and libraries. This included debugging kernel panics and hangs -- across many subsystems and usually to the line of code -- creating instrumentation and patches, proposing solutions to the lab, and managing escalations.In addition, I developed and delivered operating systems internals training to HP-UX R&D, support engineers, trainers, and external partners. Topics included multiprocessing, memory management, system initialization, and kernel services. My two co-instructors and I consistently received "above average" and "excellent" evaluations.

I developed and supported HP-UX driver software for the PA-RISC architecture and helped bring up the original "Indigo" system. Later, I worked hotsites and owned the lab's patch management tools.The highlight of my lab experience was leading the design team for automatic I/O configuration. That included enhancements to the I/O system to probe cards and devices and match them to drivers, a pseudodriver and library interfaces for the I/O subsystem, and a new command called "ioscan".