Don Thorp
- Location
- Dallas/Fort Worth Area
- Industry
- Computer Software
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Don Thorp's Overview
- Current
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- Owner at TradeCrystal, LLC
- Owner at GameDev.net, LLC
- President/Owner at ZWave, LLC
- Past
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- Director Platform Engineering at Appcelerator
- Android Platform Lead at Appcelerator
- Software Development Manager at CREDANT Technologies
- Senior Software Developer at ChipData, Inc.
- Software Architect at Vast Solutions, Inc.
- Director of Software Development at V.Cities, Inc.
- Contractor at Over The Moon Productions
- President/Owner at Bells & Whistles Software, Inc.
- Applications Development Manager at Crystal Semiconductor
- Software Developer at Tandy/TE Electronics/AST Research, Inc.
- Software Developer at AST Research
- Industrial Engineer at General Dynamics
- Education
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- Texas Christian University
- Oral Roberts University
- Bixby High School
- Recommendations
-
10 people have recommended Don
- Connections
-
447 connections
- Websites
Don Thorp's Summary
Startup Architect and Serial Entrepreneur with experience starting and working in several startups in addition to working for larger companies.
My primary skills are software architect, development manager, and principle software developer. I also have system administration skills in Microsoft and Linux environments. I manage the network for my own company including remote data center operations as well as provide small business services related to IT.
In addition to my development related skills, I have opened and managed offices for companies. Worked with accountants and attorneys to create S-Corps and LLCs and been primary business manager for several of my startups.
Specialties
Android, Java, Javascript, Ruby, XML, Web Application Development, JSP, Tomcat, Servlets, Linux Administration, Rails, CSS, HTML, Eclipse, Ant, UML, bookeeping, network design, client server architecture, n-tier application design and development.
Don Thorp's Experience
Owner
GameDev.net, LLC
Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry
November 1999 – Present (12 years 4 months)
President/Owner
ZWave, LLC
February 1998 – Present (14 years 1 month)
ZWave, LLC is development and small business services company.
We currently own, develop, and operate LOL.com.
We hold an interest and help run GameDev, LLC.
We conceived, self-funded development, and built Select Payment Processing, LLC an ACH/Electronic funds processing system. The company was later sold to Jack Henry and Associates.
Director Platform Engineering
Appcelerator
Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry
August 2011 – December 2011 (5 months)
Remotely managed Titanium platform development teams targeting Android, HTML5, and iOS. Successfully moved a diverse team from a cowboy culture to a repeatable process that improved quality and stability of the product line. Worked closely with Quality Engineering, Support, Client Services, and Marketing to integrate feedback into the product and provide support to customers.
Designed and documented issue tracking guidelines used for the Titanium JIRA project.
Created a development process that utilizing elements of Scrum that included code reviews, testing before merges by development and quality engineering, and simplified branch management.
Android Platform Lead
Appcelerator
Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry
March 2009 – August 2011 (2 years 6 months)
Team lead for Titanium Android project.
Architected and implemented the Titanium Android platform as its sole engineer for a year. Provided implementation, documentation, community support (Q&A forum), customer support, testing, and developer relations.
Designed, prototyped, and let the team implementing Titanium platform support for Blackberry taking it to beta before handing off to another team.
Software Development Manager
CREDANT Technologies
Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry
March 2002 – August 2008 (6 years 6 months)
Managed the server development team and was responsible for a large portion of the multi-threaded, multi-process server code base. Wrote and maintained the data abstraction layer which communicated with MS SQL and MySQL. Designed and co-implemented many of the back-end server processes. Built and maintained build tools for a component based build system based on Ant. Performed server production builds.
Alternate sysadmin helping design our IT infrastructure and providing occasional support. Responsible for CVS and Subversion servers as well as the development team test systems.
Responsible for software distribution, license key management services and software, and release process oversight. Helped coordinate releases with the release manager.
Senior Software Developer
ChipData, Inc.
May 2001 – March 2002 (11 months)
Designed and developed infrastructure extensions to Java based Design Chain Management software. Tasks included using SQL for managing data, developing server-side data transfer components in Java to interact with databases and to produce XML documents for client side processing.
Developed Swing based client client, sever-side components, and SQL for maintaining a complex data classification system. Restructured existing build system with more than 20 modules to ease maintenance, reduce build times, and reduce server resource utilization.
Software Architect
Vast Solutions, Inc.
December 2000 – April 2001 (5 months)
Company went out of business in April of 2001.
Designed and developed message oriented middleware product for wireless application development and deployment. Used Java 2, RMI, JMX, and JDBC in the implementation. The application utilized multiple classloaders to allow dynamic loading and unloading of MBean services without terminating the application.
Built a scalable message server that would scale from one to many machines, provided for an in-memory or database backing store, utilized thread pools for receipt and dispatching of messages, provided sophisticated logging via log4j, and handled disconnected recipients with an internal scheduling service. Developed numerous MBeans to deploy services in the middleware environment. Used JUnit for automated unit testing. Developed a structured build process for repeatable builds on multiple platforms using Ant.
Director of Software Development
V.Cities, Inc.
September 2000 – December 2000 (4 months)
Company went out of business in December of 2000.
Helped identify products and services that were deployed on the companies proprietary Media Exchange Matrix (MEM) a national network utilizing Terabit routers. Worked heavily in testing of the Ellecoya products for integration into MEM. Developed and implemented corporate marketing website using ASP, XML, XSLT, Javascript, and VBScript.
Developed maintenance and release procedures for deployed services including web hosting and streaming media.
Began definition of software development guidelines and procedures to implement after company received its' first financing round.
Contractor
Over The Moon Productions
May 1997 – October 1999 (2 years 6 months)
Developed software for the Gateway Destination PC. Utilized Win32 SDK, Visual C++, ATL, and COM. Authored a multi-threaded scheduling engine to manage time based events such as recording and program guide downloads. Developed DirectShow component and filter graph that captured images from a video stream persisting them to disk. Developed user interface for the snapshot program and integrated it into the Destination UI. Architected interfaces for component integration between various sub-systems. Created a build system and procedures to standardize building the product and distribute daily builds.
Added extensions to X Windows Manager to provide features for proprietary software project. Also did some Java JNI integration into Win32.
President/Owner
Bells & Whistles Software, Inc.
June 1993 – June 1999 (6 years 1 month)
Developed an object-oriented assembler for the Texas Instruments speech synthesizers using Borland C++. The assembler generated code for an emulator that provided debugging facilities on par with Turbo Debugger, a development IDE, and integrated assembler.
Applications Development Manager
Crystal Semiconductor
May 1995 – May 1997 (2 years 1 month) Bedford, TX
Located, acquired, and furnished a remote office in Bedford Texas and managed a team of 6 developers. This included design and installation of a wiring plant, purchase and administration of a Toshiba phone system, specification and building of department server, acquiring office furniture, supplies, and other office equipment.
Built a 3D environment with animated objects and 3D sound using DirectX and Visual C++ to demonstrate Crystal’s 3D audio hardware and Cirrus Logic’s 3D video hardware. This environment could be navigated using a Microsoft joystick.
Created internationalization software using Visual C++ for Windows 95 that allowed applications to be localized into 20 languages. Built localization tools C++ and Perl for localizing audio drivers on DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT 4.0.
Helped design and manage a Microsoft TAPI based answering machine and speakerphone. Co-developed a prototype VOIP speakerphone that was used between Austin and Bedford.
Software Developer
Tandy/TE Electronics/AST Research, Inc.
1988 – 1995 (7 years)
Oversaw and participated in project inception, design, implementation, and production. Provided technical leadership and instruction to other departments. Simultaneously maintained and extended several products. Consulted on time critical tasks to provide solutions, recommendations, and course directions. Distributed information to other engineers to improve overall skill level of department by writing technical papers, suggesting courses of study, giving presentations, and answering questions on an individual basis.
Windows - Maintained and extended Tandy’s WinMate product using C++. This included reducing startup time by over 50%. Helped coordinate and produce three large demo discs for Tandy MPCs running Microsoft Windows with Multimedia Extensions. Wrote tools using C++ to manipulate multimedia elements to production, creation, and presentation of multimedia applications. Experienced in writing applications and system software under Microsoft Windows 3.X using C/C++ and the SDK.
VIS - Modular Windows - Produced the VIS sampler disc. Wrote the presentation package that was used for the demos on the sampler disc. Created procedures and coordinated production of CD-ROMs for independent software vendors. Assisted Compton’s New Media in optimizing their encyclopedia which was written using Borland C++. Provided development support to independent software vendors. Helped create image compression tools and playback engine to utilize unique YUV video hardware built into the Tandy Sensation! multimedia computer and VIS entertainment and education system. Co-authored unique video cleanup tools for which Tandy began the patent process.
Software Developer
AST Research
Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Computer Hardware industry
1992 – 1994 (2 years)
Continuation of work mentioned int Tandy section above. AST purchased Tandy Electronics.
Industrial Engineer
General Dynamics
Public Company; 10,001+ employees; GD; Defense & Space industry
May 1987 – September 1988 (1 year 5 months)
Operations Research/Computer Applications - Developed applications in C for the industrial engineering staff's use in estimating the production costs of the F-16. Participated in a team project that specified, designed, and implemented a system to automate a large portion of the cost estimation process.
Don Thorp's Skills & Expertise
Don Thorp's Education
Texas Christian University
BSCS, Computer Science
1984 – 1987
Oral Roberts University
Chemistry
1981 – 1984
Bixby High School
1978 – 1981
Don Thorp's Additional Information
- Websites:
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