Aslam Karachiwala

Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry

2008 – 2010 (2 years)

* Determined infrastructure needs; evaluated open source technology/tool options; set up the infrastructure — AWS-EC2 + LAMP + Tomcat + Berkeley DB — for the user-facing site/services, as well as development and team collaboration.
* Ongoing design and implementation of various aspects of the social networking product, including gateway agnostic SMS handling, integration with other players in the ecosystem, mobile applications, etc.
* Active involvement in all aspects of the venture; work closely with founder on technical matters.

Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry

August 2007 – July 2008 (1 year)

* Developed and maintained message/OSGi based platform, for semantic applications that provided data integration and BPM.
* Designed and implemented “semantic adapter agent” — an interface for semantic CRUD operations and SPARQL queries against the platform's semantic stores.
* Designed, implemented and employed a testing framework for the platform's various components. Automated the tests by embedding servers, such as Jetty, HSQLDB and ActiveMQ.
* Collaborated on implementation and testing of a platform component that interfaced with the Oracle Jena Adapter.

Public Company; 501-1000 employees; OPWV; Computer Software industry

April 2006 – January 2007 (10 months)

(Resigned in order to attend to a family emergency out of state.)
* As a member of the new Rich Mail engineering team, developed and enhanced the Ajax based webmail front end of Openwave's mail server products used by large telcos.
* Maintained and adapted the underlying Java/J2EE based application and supporting systems, all proprietary, for the new features.
* Participated in the specification and design of Rich Mail as it began to evolve into a feature-rich user interface for a layperson's various communication options.
* Assisted the Quality Assurance & Performance team in designing tests for the new product.

Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Insurance industry

July 2003 – March 2005 (1 year 9 months)

* Lead technologist of lean, efficient team that developed high-end online products delivering financial data/info pertaining to US insurance industry. Data, residing in an Oracle database, were retrieved using JDBC to execute PL/SQL procedures & queries, and presented using XML/XSLT & JSP.
* Designed modular, genericized/parameterized architecture for Java/J2EE web applications, running in JRun & Tomcat servlet engines, with iPlanet & Apache HTTP servers, on Unix.
* Implemented framework that combined custom base classes extending the Java Servlet API with an MVC framework (Struts), and aimed at ability to switch/update/enhance the MVC framework used with minimal change to application code – an implementation of the Facade pattern described in the book by the “Gang of Four.”
* Established coding & design standards for development team.
* Managed/co-ordinated development projects, ranging from annual database maintenance, to implementation & release of new/updated online products.

Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Publishing industry

June 1998 – June 2003 (5 years 1 month)

* Prototyped, then built for sale the group's first MVC-based web application, which included dynamic reports generated using home-grown JSP Custom Tags (pre-Struts).
* Evaluated the efficacy of EJB for the group's online products.
* Streamlined and automated data production and application build and deployment processes, using shell scripts, Ant and Webmin, among others.
* Trained and assisted junior developers as well as product managers.
* Administered source code control, web and application servers, as well as the development, QA, and production environments on Unix servers.

Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Information Services industry

March 1996 – May 1998 (2 years 3 months)

* Participated in the porting of a financial data product suite from a proprietary Windows CD-ROM platform to a web-based one. Began with dynamic web pages that invoked a CGI program, which we subsequently replaced with ASP/IIS based applications. The sale of the business necessitated the applications' evolution to Netscape's (now defunct) Server-Side JavaScript platform, using their Enterprise/iPlanet web server, running on Unix servers. A subsequent reorganization led to adopting the Java/J2EE web application technology.
* As lead developer for the group's US Banking (CD-ROM) product, owned the monthly production processes, written in C, and ensured timely releases.
* Enhanced low-level C libraries running on OpenVMS.
* Developed Acumate (OLAP database, now defunct) 4GL procedures for formula calculations of data and report generation.

Nonprofit; 501-1000 employees; Museums and Institutions industry

February 1996 – March 1996 (2 months)

Managed five-member IT operations team supporting the Museum's Retail Product, Sales & Marketing department, including the warehouse and four retail stores.

Nonprofit; 501-1000 employees; Museums and Institutions industry

July 1993 – February 1996 (2 years 8 months)

* Developed warehouse productivity tracking system using HP TurboIMAGE database and Cognos Powerhouse 4GL.
* Maintained TurboIMAGE databases using Adager.
* Enhanced and maintained mission-critical collate production and shipping manifest systems.