Kent Cowgill

Current

Perl Developer at Google
CPAN Author at CPAN
Perl Development Consultant at C2group, Inc

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Past

Senior Software Engineer at FastWeb
Web System Administrator at Archipelago
Unix Administrator at Chicago Public Schools

Solaris System Administrator at Calyon Financial
Software Engineer at Wynwyn.com
Software Engineer at Motorola
Software Engineer at iGive
Software Engineer at WebPromote
Software Engineer at Intersites
Software Engineer at Reach Magazine

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7 more...

Education

Ball State University

Recommended

1 person has recommended Kent

Connections

179 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Kent Cowgill’s Summary

Perl developer with over 12 years of experience with Software Engineering
with Perl, SQL; System Administration and security skills.

Kent Cowgill’s Specialties:

Web development, Perl, Catalyst, Template Toolkit, Testing, JavaScript, Unix

Kent Cowgill’s Experience

Perl Developer

Google

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; GOOG; Internet industry)

January 2008 — Present (1 year)
CPAN Author

CPAN

(Non-Profit; 5001-10,000 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

January 2006 — Present (3 years)
Perl Development Consultant

C2group, Inc

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

June 2001 — Present (7 years 7 months)

Various consulting on projects including System Administration, assembling internet-accessible private networks with mixed platforms (Unix, WinNT/9X), web page and site design, database migration, and client-server web application design and implementation focusing on Perl and Catalyst.
Senior Software Engineer

FastWeb

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)

August 2006 — December 2007 (1 year 5 months)

Developed test suite for creating unit tests for legacy custom template code, making extensive use of black box reverse engineering, Test::MockObject, and namespace manipulation, allowing code coverage reporting with Devel::Cover, running code through Perl::Critic and resultant HTML through HTML::Lint.

Created and delivered presentations for introducing unit testing, Perl::Critic, Devel::Cover, and proper use of new test suite.

Performed peer code reviews, acting as quality gatekeeper prior to code release, catching DRY violation, unused code, unused debugging or temporary variables, and inefficient algorithms.

Worked on various updates to existing web applications, increasing advertisement generated revenue.
Web System Administrator

Archipelago

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Financial Services industry)

March 2006 — July 2006 (5 months)

Automated server statistics gathering with highly modular Perl web scraping program.

Automated website health checks with Perl program.

Wrote in-depth Perl packet analysis program to track down communication issues between web tier and back-end data tier.

Administered Foundry Server Iron load balancers.

Administered and supported external facing websites.

Migrated, administered, and supported internal documentation wiki (Twiki).
Unix Administrator

Chicago Public Schools

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Education Management industry)

May 2005 — February 2006 (10 months)

Successfully migrated DHCP services for 600,000 network devices and DNS services from AIX to Solaris servers.

Diagnosed and corrected multiple long standing configuration/import errors in Perl application to facilitate migration.

Administered DNS and DHCP services for entire school district and central office, with approximately 1,3000 DNS domains and 660,000 network devices. Server platforms: AIX and Solaris 9.

Developed standard Redhat Enterprise Linux installation procedure for central office.
Solaris System Administrator

Calyon Financial

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; Financial Services industry)

June 2001 — April 2005 (3 years 11 months)

Recommended hardware configuration for Solaris web servers to ensure redundancy, availability, and 99%+ uptime for customer facing web presense and electronic brokerage servers.

Set up and configured Solaris servers for web services with Dynabase, iPlanet, JRun, Tomcat, Apache, and J2EE with special attention to security concerns and server optimization.

Developed Perl, PHP, MySQL, and shell applications for essential system monitoring and administration procedures and report processing.

Devloped global scripted server installation and hardening procedures in Perl, Bourne shell, sed, and awk.

Performed regular scripted security audits in Perl and Korn shell of all Solaris servers, producing detailed HTML reports and server cluster summaries.
Software Engineer

Wynwyn.com

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

2000 — 2001 (1 year)

Implemented and developed multi-tier client server applications. Server applications utilized relational database technologies.

Client applications are all web browser based clients, using the latest technologies: Java Servlets, JSP, Java Beans, Tomcat, IIS, Cold Fusion 4.5, and SQL Server 7.0/2000.

Deigned and constructed Java Server Pages, Servlets, and Beans for business registration.

Designed and constructed a multi-threaded Java database extract for extracting web-accessible business listings from a 20 million record database.

Assisted in the design and implementation of relational database schema and stored procedures.

Assisted in development and realization of high level and detail design documents or business registration.

Diagnosed and fixed numerous bugs in the business search function using Cold Fusion.
Software Engineer

Motorola

(Public Company; Consumer Electronics industry)

1999 — 2000 (1 year)

Designed and constructed automated tasks using Perl to perform web based reports.

Architected Oracle database extracts using Perl for populating a web accessible datamart, enabling order status inquiries or an enterprise wide e-commerce solution.

Assisted in te design and implementation of relational database schema, triggers, stored procedures, and disaster recovery.

Assisted in development and realization of high level and detail design documents for an enterprise wide e-commerce solution.
Software Engineer

iGive

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Philanthropy industry)

1998 — 1999 (1 year)

Implemented and developed multi-tier client server applications. Server applications utilized relational database technologies.

Client application are all web browser based clients, using the latest technologies: IIS, Cold Fusion 4, SQL Server 6.5, and Perl.

Assisted in the development of relational database schema, store procedures and disaster recovery.

Led design and implementation of an intranet calendar/task scheduling application.

Led design and implementation of web based intranet applications, giving employees restricted access to database components.

Designed and constructed automated tasks to perform web based reports.

Database engine used: MS SQL (running on Windows NT) with a planned migration to Oracle (running on Solaris).
Software Engineer

WebPromote

(Public Company; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

1998 — 1998 (less than a year)

Implemented and developed multi-tier client server applications. Server applications utilized relational database technologies.

Client applications are all web browser based clients, using the latest technologies: Perl, SQL.
Assisted in the development of relational database schema, stored procedure and disaster recovery.

Led design and implementation of web based intranet applications, giving employees restricted access to database components.

Designed and constructed automated tasks to perform web based reports.

Designed and constructed server monitoring software to ensure 99%+ uptime.

Relational database migrated from flat files and MySQL to full relational database utilizing Oracle.
Server platforms were all UNIX (Solaris with some BSDi.)
Software Engineer

Intersites

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

1996 — 1997 (1 year)

Developed dynamic web sites for multiple clients. Web sites served dynamic content based upon user generated queries.

Extensive I.S. support with clients, including account creation and server configuration, customization, and fault tolerance.

Set up and maintained various internet services on UNIX (Linux), Win9X, WinNT, Windows 3.X, and MacOS: Web, FTP, DNS, Mail, Telnet.

Designed and implemented internal intranets for project and client tracking.

Recommended hardware for Intel based Linux platform.
Software Engineer

Reach Magazine

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Publishing industry)

1994 — 1996 (2 years)

Extended a RAD tool used to handle accounts receivable. Extensions utilized the RAD tool's API using the C programming language. Wrote various functions to enhance text-handling capabilities.

Assisted development of a custom accounts receivable application for franchisee integration and accounting.

Supported and maintained I.S. infrastructure for remote sales force and internal inside sales force.

Responsible for increasing sales force efficiency by 80%.

Produced audio and video presentations that utilized cutting edge technologies in internet based production.