Matthew Passell

Current

Founder/Software Consultant at Grove Hill Software, LLC

Past

Senior Software Engineer/Team Lead at aPriori
Java/J2EE Developer at IntraLinks, Inc.
Senior Software Engineer at OMS SafeHarbor

Product Developer at BMC Software Inc
Web Application Developer at Electronic Field Guide Project, University of Massachusetts Boston

see less...

2 more...

Education

University of Massachusetts Boston
Oberlin College

Recommended

1 person has recommended Matthew

Connections

160 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Matthew Passell’s Summary

I'm a software consultant with considerable design and development experience in Java/J2EE who's interested in solving complex problems, particularly those involving concurrent programming. I'm passionate about expanding my knowledge of technologies. I've built a simple Swing app in Groovy and worked on two client projects involving Grails. I've also taken a look at the Scala language (http://www.scala-lang.org/), which takes a very interesting approach to concurrent programming.

Matthew Passell’s Specialties:

Design patterns and OO design generally

Java (concurrent programming, JDBC, servlets/JSPs, JDOM, Castor, RMI, applets, JavaBeans, Swing, log4j, reflection)

Oracle, SQL Server, Access, and ObjectStore

HTML/JavaScript, XML, and XML Schema

Various design/development/deployment tools and app servers

Matthew Passell’s Experience

Founder/Software Consultant

Grove Hill Software, LLC

(Computer Software industry)

September 2007 — Present (2 years 3 months)

- Help a micro-ISV rearchitect and refactor a Java web-based reporting, charting, and analysis product to improve scalability and simplify future maintenance.
- Provide technical advice to an early-stage startup building a Groovy/Grails web application in the education finance space.
- Create a custom Grails web application to help a small business track the time of employees and subcontractors.
- Founded a private professional network for consultants
Senior Software Engineer/Team Lead

aPriori

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

December 2005 — September 2007 (1 year 10 months)

- Lead of the UI team at a company developing a large Swing-based application that integrates with mechanical CAD software to provide real-time manufacturing cost estimates.
- Drove the architecture of the UI layer, including ongoing refactoring and education to make sure the code moves toward that architecture.
- Developed a Task Queue infrastructure that substantially simplifies the process of implementing tasks that require execution across multiple threads.
- Used Abbot, an extension to JUnit, to incorporate unit and smoke tests for the UI into our build.
- Managed two developers, including mentoring a junior developer.
- Worked with the UI Designer, other Development team leads, Product Management, and QA to uncover and clarify all UI requirements as early in the development cycle as possible.
Java/J2EE Developer

IntraLinks, Inc.

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

April 2004 — November 2005 (1 year 8 months)

- Design and develop modules for a SaaS company providing collaborative and secure document sharing services to the financial and pharmaceutical industries.
- Work with a massively scalable architecture (150,000+ total users) backed by clustered web/application/database servers.
- Use several enterprise technologies, including Oracle, J2EE (EJBs, Servlets, and JSPs) on WebLogic 8.1/9.0, Struts, and Spring.
Senior Software Engineer

OMS SafeHarbor

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

October 2003 — March 2004 (6 months)

RESCUE: A J2EE based Web application for managing the lifecycle of digital assets from draft to physical production.
ACROSS: Leverages RESCUE to make digital assets directly available to customers.
- Deployed on WebLogic.
- Used the Cocoon XML MVC framework running under Tomcat for the presentation layer.
- Configured HTTPS on Tomcat and WebLogic, including obtaining certificates from Thawte and Verisign.
- Set up a data access layer using prepared statements with Oracle.
- Used Java NIO to efficiently process large file transfers.
- Incorporated secure sockets to encrypt the network traffic.
- Exposed session bean facades to provide access to entity beans and their associated data via Bean Managed Persistence (BMP) and container managed transactions.
Product Developer

BMC Software Inc

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; BMC; Computer Software industry)

June 2001 — September 2003 (2 years 4 months)

Performance Perceiver [originally known as PATROL Perceive] (provides custom views of several different forms of performance data within a web browser)
- Directly involved with the development of the product from earliest design and prototype through two releases.
- Co-designed common data infrastructure.
- Developed implementations of the data infrastructure for two proprietary data sources, along with implementations for several databases (Oracle 8i and 9i, SQL Server, and Access) using JDBC.
- Used Castor (Java data binding) and JDOM to access and edit XML configuration files.
- Created main ant build file, which invokes ant on several sub-projects, including one which compiles and links a large C++ project.
- Used Java Cryptography Extension to provide symmetric encryption of all password data.
- Incorporated the log4j logging package and provided training to developers and technical support on its use.
Web Application Developer

Electronic Field Guide Project, University of Massachusetts Boston

(Educational Institution; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

August 1998 — May 2001 (2 years 10 months)

- Starting with only a prototype, designed a Web-based biological field guide and tools for importing field guide data.
- Wrote classes using JDOM to handle XML input files and dynamically generate HTML/XML output.
- Provided image-based access to field guides through Swing applets communicating with Java Servlets, along with text-based searches using Servlets and JSPs.
- Used JavaBeans to encapsulate business logic and represent data from an ObjectStore database, extracted with a custom-coded, thread-safe connection pool.
- Created a data import tool using JDBC for extracting field guide data from biologists' FileMaker Pro and Access databases and add it to an ObjectStore database.
- Wrote and maintained a sophisticated ant build, including a custom ant task that post-processed classes for use with ObjectStore.
- Trained other developers as they joined the project.

Matthew Passell’s Education

University of Massachusetts Boston

M.S. , Computer Science , September 1998 — May 2001

- Implemented a datalink layer network protocol in C.
- Built a functional spreadsheet application in Java (Swing) from detailed specifications.
- Designed and built an optimizing compiler for a subset of C.
- Authored a research paper detailing the technical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding three file sharing protocols.
Oberlin College

B.A. , History , September 1991 — May 1996

Additional Information

Matthew Passell’s Interests:

Taiko (Japanese drumming), Scala, Groovy/Grails

Matthew Passell’s Groups:

Boston Scalability User Group, Boston Grails Users' Group, New England Java Users Group (NEJUG), Boston Java Meetup, Odaiko New England Community Member