JuliasShaw.com

As Engineering Team Lead for the Platform Group I was responsible for developing a technology vision and processes for developing components and frameworks to be used by OuterBay's application groups. I was also responsible for training and mentoring in object-oriented design, distributed systems, and software development. In addition to these duties I did full life-cycle development of key technologies individually and with other team members and perform detailed due dilligence of competitors' and partners' technologies and business models. I transformed OuterBay's core technology from an unorganized collection of perl scripts to a professional Java product.

OuterBay Technologies is a leading provider of software products for mastering applications data growth. Through proactive archiving of production databases, customers improve application performance, minimize down-time for upgrades and maintenance, reduce storage costs, and provide users continuous access to historical data.

As a member of OuterBay's technology advisory board I provided both strategic and tactical business and technical counsel to the executive team and engineering department through their transformation from a small professional services firm to a product company.

Autodaq is a business to business e-commerce company in the automotive space. Autodaq is an online market for the trade of used vehicles between car dealerships, fleet management companies, rental agencies, banks, and the automobile manufacturers' captive finance divisions. The system features a shopping and auction engine with purchasing decisions supported by photographs, detailed vehicle inspections, and wholesale vehicle pricing information. In addition account information, purchase tracking, and detailed reporting on market statistics is available to both buyers and sellers.

My employment at Autodaq had two distinct phases. During the first I built the application development team. This included hiring, setting coding practices, and creating the initial development environment. On the technical side I performed the business modeling, requirements gathering, and the bulk of the analysis and design. In addition I performed a major role in the implementation of the system along with my management responsibilities. The system was implemented as servlets communicating with JavaBeans and Enterprise JavaBeans. Persistent storage was provided by Oracle 8i and integration to 3rd party systems was done using MOM (Message Oriented Middleware.) WebLogic was used to run servlets and also hosted the EJBs. Oracle Advanced Queue was used as the message server. The development and production environments were Solaris with the exception of some third-party applications we integrated with that required a Windows NT environment.

In my second phase at Autodaq, after being promoted to CTO, I focused on our development processes, system architecture, and representing the company's technology to customers. The development process we created was based on XP (eXtreme Programming) and provided considerable business benefits. It decreased our development cycle for major functionality to 3-6 weeks, quality was improved, and schedule slips were virtually eliminated. The process also improved communication and cross-training within the team, allowing much greater flexibility in staffing individual projects and significant risk reduction. The architecture was optimized to allow rapid project implementation and reduce the development headcount needed to maintain the system. In representing the company to customers I was instrumental in showing our customers how Autodaq's processes and technologies made us not only competitive with much larger organizations that were well established in our industry, but superior to them in many ways.

At HP I worked on the Pricing Engine, a software component designed to provide easy to use, high performance, robust, and consistent pricing functionality to Hewlett Packard businesses. The Pricing Engine is marketed to internal Hewlett Packard teams that are developing e-commerce applications for internal and external use.

The Pricing Engine is implemented entirely in Java. It may be used either as a JavaBean or COM object (using a wrapper), or it can be deployed as a distributed component using the ActiveBroker message oriented middleware server.

My technical responsibilities included performance tuning, the distributed component model, and system robustness. In addition to this I led a project to integrate the Pricing Engine into SAP's configurator for use on a consumer products web site. On this project I was responsible for the requirements gathering and design, as well as the bulk of the implementation and testing tasks. In addition to my technical responsibilities I provide mentoring in OO analysis and design and Java to the rest of the Pricing Engine Team.

At Sqribe I worked on ReportMart, an enterprise report repository that complimented the companies flagship product, SQR. ReportMart is implemented entirely in Java and utilizes a proprietary 'CORBA like' distributed server architecture. It is currently in production on most major operating systems (Solaris, HP/UX, Linux, MVS, VMS, and Windows NT) and databases (Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, Informix, and MS SQL Server.)

I was lead developer and mentor on a team that developed three major modules for ReportMart. An event-based task scheduler, a report distribution module, and a report subscription component. I was responsible for the requirements analysis, design and a significant portion of the implementation of these subsystems. The task scheduler initially supports only time based scheduling, but is architected to be easily extended to additional types of events. The report distribution module supports externalizing information from ReportMart. It is driver-based and currently has drivers for SMTP e-mail and database distribution. Future drivers are planned for other types of e-mail (Exchange and CC Mail) and push distribution. The subscription module allows users to indicate interest in categories, reports, or documents and they will be notified when changes in those items occur. In addition I developed a database API on top of JDBC that allowed code to be tuned for specific databases while still allowing it to work against any JDBC accessible database with a minimum of effort and extended the system to expose state changes in the servers to the various clients using a distributed event model.

This project was a complete redesign and implementation of an existing product called CheckCite. CheckCite allows clients of Lexis-Nexis to process a legal brief and determine if any of the cites contained within the brief are incorrect or have been overturned. CheckCite was initially a successful product, several years ago, but the port to Windows was not well accepted, and a large share of the market had been lost to a competitor with a technically superior product. An attempt had been made to improve the existing product, but ultimately, that ended in failure.

I was responsible for several parts of the new system. I designed and implemented the integration with document management systems. This included supporting the ODMA standard, and having special integration features when used with PC DOCS. I also performed the analysis, design, and implementation of the database and database middleware for both the client software and the Lexis-Nexis database. The middleware was implemented as a collection of high-performance COM ATL objects. Rational Rose was used for the object modeling and Visual C++ 5.0 was used for all implementation.

Requisite Technology provides electronic cataloging, content management, and business to business purchasing software and services to Fortune 1000 companies. When I started with Requisite as a consultant they had a Visual Basic client/server system near the final stages of initial development, but were having a number of serious problems in the areas of performance, reliability, and code stability. At my advice, Requisite and I then developed a number of prototypes demonstrating the problems in the current system and providing solutions using a Java based architecture that allowed them to greatly improve their business model.

I was then hired as Chief Technical Architect and went on to build a team that developed an all Java system making heavy use of Oracle, Cadis, ObjectStore, and Marimba's Castanet. At that point I was then given the additional duties of Director of Catalog Systems Engineering where I created a CORBA based middle tier server that greatly improved the reliability, performance, and ease of use of the electronic catalog.

Requisite Technology now has a number of clients including Charles Schwab, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and others that have not yet been publicly announced. All of these companies have conducted studies that concluded that by using Requisite Technology's system they would greatly reduce the costs associated with their purchasing practices. For more information about Requisite Technology, you can see their web site at www.requisite.com.

This was a proof of concept project that involved taking a Visual Basic and MS SQL Server system and porting core pieces of it to the WWW. The program was an electronic ordering system. I ported the user interface to Java and the database to Oracle 7.3. Oracle Web Server 2.0 and its associated database classes were then used to access the data from Java. The client's major concerns were in the areas of system performance, speed of development, and user interface complexity. The Java prototype showed that it was capable of meeting or exceeding the current system's capabilities in all of these areas, while giving the cross-platform and maintenance advantages of a WWW based system.

On this project I developed a foreign currency trading system written in Java for an east coast bank. This project included quoting, interactive communication, position monitoring, and security modules. The client software is coded completely in Java to allow institutional investors using various platforms to communicate with traders at the bank. The traders may use either a customized version of MarketSheet(tm) or a Java application to access the system. Currency quotes are currently obtained from an Applix spreadsheet, although capability has also been built in to use a Reuter's news feed. Upon the clients initiation of a trade the trader may either immediately authorize it or start a 'chat' session to obtain more information. Current positions are stored in a Sybase database and retrieved using Weblogic's db/KonaT3 product.

At HotWired I managed the database systems, developed WWW based reports, and wrote database applications. The database is Sybase System 10 running on an SGI Challenge DM. I wrote several perl and tcsh shell scripts to automate DBA tasks. I worked on the HotStats project, an extensive internal web site that reports on web site usage. HotStats was developed primarily in Perl 5. Java was used to develop a graphing utility for HotStats. I also developed an advertising scheduling tool written as CGI scripts in Perl and eventually ported it to Java.

In this project I worked on a system called RMS (Risk Monitoring System). RMS was the first Client/Server project for this group. As such, I was responsible for all aspects of the project from coding to mentoring of the developers. The system was prototyped in Access and the final product was developed in Visual Basic. Data Widgets, VB Assist, Quick Pak Pro, and the Bennet-Tek Outline Control were all used on this project. The data resided in Access 2.0 for the stand-alone version, and in Microsoft SQL Server 6.0 for the network version of the program.

In the first phase of this project I worked on a five person team to develop a hydroelectric optimization system called SOCRATES (Stochastic Optimal Coordination of River basins And ThermoElectric Subsystems). I primarily worked on the user interface and database aspects of this project. The user interface was prototyped and implemented in Visual Basic using the Data Widgets, Distinct TCP/IP, and VS/VBX custom controls. The data was stored in Sybase SQL Server 4.21 running on HP 9000 Servers. We used Access to store temporary data locally and to attach Sybase tables where needed for performance. Erwin/ERX was used to model the database and Desktop DBA was used for database maintenance and administration. A range of reports were created using Crystal Reports Pro. Distinct TCP/IP was used to communicate with several C shell scripts on the HP servers.

The second phase was to process a large volume of data coming from a WWW browser and create Excel worksheets. CGI scripts written in Perl and C preprocessed some of the data on the HP 9000 WWW server before sending it to the browser. A small Visual Basic program then took the data coming from the WWW browser and using OLE automation started Excel and ran a number of custom VBA macros on it.

I worked on a number of commercial and internal products for MBA Software. I developed a help desk management and bug tracking tool for internal use. I managed a small team that developed the company's first two Windows products for commercial sale. This work was done in Visual Basic and also made use of Access, Word for Windows, SpyWorks/VB, Quick Pack Pro, Data Widgets, VB Assist, Delphi, PDQ Comm, TabFrame, and VB Compress. In this position I also conducted an intensive evaluation of Delphi Client/Server. This entailed developing a number of small applications in Delphi Client/Server, Visual Basic Pro, and Clarion for Windows concurrently to determine how the products compared in the areas of ease of use, functionality, speed of finished programs, resource efficiency, and team development.

I provided web site development, custom programming, instruction, and computer consulting to businesses in Northern California and Southern Oregon. Most of my work was done in Java, Perl, Delphi, Visual Basic, and Access with some use of C and SQL Server.

Vorpal Systems provided a full range of computer services to small businesses, primarily 5 to 25 person offices. These services included software installation and technical support, custom programming, hardware servicing and maintenance, training, needs assessment and network installation.