Alex Miller

Alex Miller

Sr. Engineer at Terracotta, Speaker, Writer

Greater St. Louis Area

Current
  • Owner and Chief Strange Officer at Strange Loop LLC
  • Conference Speaker (No Fluff Just Stuff) at Big Sky Technology
  • Tech Lead at Terracotta
Past

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4 more...

Education
  • Washington University in St. Louis
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Parkway West Sr. High
Recommended
Alex has 7 recommendations 7 people have recommended Alex
Connections
387 connections
Industry
Computer Software
Websites

Alex Miller’s Summary

I have 10+ years of software development experience, working across the software and product lifecycle. The majority of that time has been spent working in Java, although I have programmed professionally in several lanuagues (C++, C, Pascal, Python, Perl). I have a strong theoretical computer science background, with focuses in computational complexity and artificial intelligence. However, my real love is in building software for people to use. I am a developer at heart although I have performed in many roles over the years. I am an active and constant learner and always interested in learning new technologies.

Personal technical blog: http://tech.puredanger.com

Alex Miller’s Specialties:

Java, query engine, JDBC, SQL, XML, object-oriented design, unit testing, JUnit, databases, XQuery, J2EE, Eclipse, XA, grammars, parsers, design patterns, performance profiling, threading, concurrency, bytecode

Alex Miller’s Experience

  • Owner and Chief Strange Officer

    Strange Loop LLC

    (Computer Software industry)

    April 2009 — Present (8 months)

    Founded and organized the Strange Loop developer conference in St. Louis. The first Strange Loop will be held October 23rd, 2009 at the Tivoli Theatre in University City.

  • Conference Speaker (No Fluff Just Stuff)

    Big Sky Technology

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    October 2007 — Present (2 years 2 months)

    Conference speaker on the No Fluff Just Stuff conference tour. Speaking on topics like Java collections, concurrency, design patterns, Terracotta, etc.

  • Tech Lead

    Terracotta

    (Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

    August 2007 — Present (2 years 4 months)

    Java development on Terracotta. Tech lead on Transparency team, working to transparently instrument a customer's application by using byte code manipulation to cluster Java heap and synchronization primitives (synchronized, wait/notify, etc) in a Terracotta cluster. Technology includes Java byte code transformation with ASM and Aspectwerkz, deep Java JDK library knowledge, performance and scalability of distributed and concurrent code, and integration with 3rd party open source projects like Spring, Hibernate, ehcache, Lucene, Quartz, etc.

  • Java Exam Author

    ReviewNet

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

    January 2008 — February 2008 (2 months)

    Wrote Java hiring exams on JDBC, EJB, and JPA.

  • Sr. Staff Engineer

    BEA Systems

    (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; BEAS; Computer Software industry)

    September 2006 — August 2007 (1 year )

    Java development

  • Chief Architect

    MetaMatrix

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

    August 1999 — August 2006 (7 years 1 month)

    Chief Architect for the MetaMatrix Server, the industry-leading EII (Enterprise Information Integration) product, which provides real-time access to information from a variety of sources, acting as a single virtual data source accessible via JDBC, ODBC, and SOAP. Led server team, implemented new features and maintained existing products.

  • Senior Systems Architect

    Connectria

    (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    February 1999 — August 1999 (7 months)

    Design and development of a Java client for enterprise network computing application. Development of a data-driven Model-View-Controller architecture extending Java Swing. GUI development with Java Swing and custom components.

  • Analyst

    State Farm Insurance

    (Privately Held; 10,001 or more employees; Insurance industry)

    September 1997 — February 1999 (1 year 6 months)

    Four months of training in object-oriented techniques and Java. Designed and implemented enterprise network computing applications in Java. Used object-oriented analysis and design with UML and Rational Rose. Designed and implemented socket-based client-server architecture, logging framework, date utility package, and report printing package. GUI development with AWT, AFC, and WFC components.

  • Software Engineer

    LexisNexis

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

    June 1996 — August 1997 (1 year 3 months)

    Designed and implemented three client-server web news products in C++ based on an internal server-side web architecture. Designed and implemented C++ persistence library for Sybase database. Maintained and extended automated web testing programs in Perl and Python.

  • Research Programmer

    CERL

    (Government Agency; 10,001 or more employees; Research industry)

    May 1994 — May 1996 (2 years 1 month)

    Developed and maintained software in Pascal for range scheduling and acoustical data collection. On-site installation including network and hardware support.

Alex Miller’s Education

  • Washington University in St. Louis

    MS , Computer Science , 1998 — 2000

  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    BS , Computer Science , 1992 — 1996

  • Parkway West Sr. High

    High School , 1988 — 1992

Additional Information

Alex Miller’s Websites:

Alex Miller’s Groups:

St. Louis Java User's Group, ACM, Clayton Symphony Orchestra, DZone

  •    UIUC Networking
  •    Java Posse
  •    Perl Mongers
  •    St Louis Information Technology Network (STLITNET)
  •    Washington University in St. Louis Alumni Association
  •    Illinois Engineering
  •    BEA Systems Greater Network
  •    Cloud Computing
  •    Washington University Alumni Association
  •    MetaMatrix Alumni
  •    JavaOne 2008
  •    LinkedWorking St. Louis
  •    St. Louis Dynamic Language Interest Group
  •    Gateway JUG
  •    LexisNexis Alumni
  •    St. Louis Java Group
  •    FindBugs
  •    Terracotta - Special Interest Group
  •    St. Louis Lambda Lounge
  •    JVM Languages Group
  •    No Fluff Just Stuff
  •    JavaOne Conference
  •    NoSQL
  •    KCJava
  •    Strange Loop Conference
  •    BarCamp St. Louis 2009

Alex Miller’s Honors:

- Contributing author: "The Definitive Guide to Terracotta" - Apress
- Co-author: "Information Intelligence: Metadata for Information Discovery, Access, and Integration" - ACM SIGMOD, (Jun 05)

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