
Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems
San Francisco Bay Area

Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems
San Francisco Bay Area
I have over 20 years of experience in enterprise software development and leadership, with a focus on distributed systems, application servers, databases and developer tools. I communicate well with technical peers and I am also strong at bridging the gap to non-technical audiences. I am respected as someone who sees the bigger picture, understands issues quickly, drives focus and knows how to get things done.
Over 10 years Java programming for enterprise products and solutions; highly available systems and clustering; databases; open source; technical analysis, design and communication; product strategy; engineering team leadership; agile development processes; object-oriented analysis and design; usability and tools.
(Public Company; SYMC; Computer Software industry)
April 2005 — Present (4 years 4 months)
Senior engineer on the Data at Rest team in Symantec's DLP (Data Loss Prevention) organization. This team is responsible for providing technology to scan storage resources within an organization and detect potential security breaches or risks.
(Public Company; JAVA; Information Technology and Services industry)
January 2007 — February 2009 (2 years 2 months)
Responsible for the strategy and direction of database tooling in NetBeans. After gathering requirements and ideas through user interviews and surveys, I led a team of engineers to design and implement an innovative set of database features, including SQL completion in PHP, and marketed it through blogs and demos.
This brought enthusiastic attention and interest in NetBeans from the previously uninterested PHP/MySQL community, helping meet a key strategic goal of the NetBeans organization.
(Public Company; JAVA; Information Technology and Services industry)
April 2003 — January 2007 (3 years 10 months)
One of the founding members of the database group. Instrumental in researching, defining and communicating a database strategy for Sun. Involved in a number of licensing/acquisition discussions and technical due diligence.
One of the architects for a clustered in-memory database and cache. Drove the overall design for the product, creating an architectural overview and organizing the team to contribute designs.
Involved in the decision to invest in Apache Derby. One of the first Sun committers to Derby. Evangelized the model of using Derby embedded in web clients and worked on getting Derby into the Sun JDK.
Technical liaison for the database group, working with engineering communities within and outside of Sun, providing guidance and gathering requirements. Produced a company-wide policy for approved database technologies, resulting in large company-wide savings from reduced licensing costs.
(Public Company; JAVA; Information Technology and Services industry)
February 2002 — April 2003 (1 year 3 months)
Soon after joining Sun, I was asked to step in and be the lead architect for the new incarnation of Sun's clustered enterprise-level application server. This was a complete rewrite of the clustering support, taking advantage of the new Clustra acquisition to provide highly scalable storage of application session state.
Working closely with the Clustra database team in Norway and the application server team in India and Santa Clara, I drove the architecture, design and implementation of both the runtime and management of the clustering support, delivering the first release of this product in less than a year.
(Computer Software industry)
August 2001 — February 2002 (7 months)
Clustra Systems provided a highly available, highly scalable shared-nothing database system. I was hired on as architect to define and implement strong integration between application servers and their database. Soon after I was hired Clustra was acquired by Sun.
(Computer Software industry)
2000 — 2001 (1 year)
I was one of the lead architects for this startup, building a visual business process engine and toolkit. In this role I helped define the product strategy and roadmap, and was a key technical lead and guide for the team.
I was also directly responsible for designing and building a dynamic-proxy based container for Enterprise Java Beans that allowed them to be choreographed and invoked by a Java-based rules engine.
We successfully delivered a beta version of this product on time, but soon after the company ran out of cash and folded.
(Religious Institutions industry)
1999 — 2000 (1 year)
While on meditation retreat at an ashram in India, I lobbied management to put in the resources to convert their disparate FoxPro databases containing visitor and staff information into a single networked solution using Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access.
After three months of lobbying they finally agreed, and I built a small team to work with the end users, understand their requirements, come up with screen mockups, design and build the solution, migrate the existing data, and deploy the integrated solution.
(Computer Software industry)
1999 — 1999 (less than a year)
Consulting gig, included work on security system database design and analysis of potential tools and partners.
(Public Company; SY; Computer Software industry)
1996 — 1998 (2 years)
When Java came out in the late nineties, I immediately saw the opportunity to apply the Open Server model to Java. I lobbied the connectivity management team to start a project to build a Java based application server, following the design patterns of Microsoft Transaction Server.
After some cajoling they agreed and made me the architect for this project. We built a small team of engineers, and delivered the first version of Sybase's Enterprise Application Server in less than a year.
(Public Company; SY; Computer Software industry)
1994 — 1996 (2 years)
Intermedia Server was the software component for a video on demand solution with Bell South. I owned the team responsible for defining and implementing a protocol between the set-top box client and the server, and for designing and implementing the code to respond to set-top box requests and to communicate with the backend database.
I worked closely with Bell South on this year-long project, including spending a month on-site in Atlanta to get the solution working for initial pilot deployments.
(Public Company; SY; Computer Software industry)
1992 — 1994 (2 years)
Navigation Server was a highly parallel, shared-nothing database engine built on Open Server. I designed and built a parallel bulk copy tool for this product.
(Public Company; SY; Computer Software industry)
1990 — 1992 (2 years)
I was the founding member of the engineering support and maintenance team for the Open Client and Open Server products. I worked closely with high-level customers, successfully handling many concurrent high priority issues and going on site as needed to solve their problems.
(Public Company; SY; Computer Software industry)
1988 — 1990 (2 years)
Various tasks working with the connectivity products, from translating tests from C to COBOL and Fortran to building a platform-independent network API.
BS , Computer Science , September 1986 — June 1991
Meditation