Rick Hightower

Current

CEO/Founder at Mammatus Inc.

Past

Consultant at Vantage Media LLC
Consultant at Consultant at Qualcomm
Chief Mentor, Consultant and CTO at ArcMind

Member at JSF JSR
Writer at IBM DeveloperWorks
Convention Speaker and on Looker at Conferences
Consultant at LowerMyBills.com
CTO at Triveratech
Director of Development at eBlox
Director of Architecture at Buzzeo
Principal Software Engineer at LookSmart
Senior Software Engineer at Intel
Software Developer at Read-Rite

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Industry

Computer Software

Websites

Rick Hightower’s Summary

Rick's latest passion is Django and Python web development.

Rick wrote and taught a course on Groovy and Grails. Grails is a framework similar in concept to Rails. (late 2008/ early 2009). He also wrote a code generator framework and DB reverse engineering tool for Crank and Presto written in Groovy/Swing.

Rick recently wrote embedded C, C/GTK+, Python modules, C modules for Python, and embedded Python scripts. He was able to get a project that was stuck in the mud, productive again by using Python for testing, development and equipment simulation.

Rick Hightower specializes in JEE development using Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Ajax, JPA, etc.

He is author of the best-selling book Java Tools for Extreme Programming (#1 SW development book on Amazon for 3 months) and coauthor of Professional Struts and Struts Live (#1 download on TSS 2004-2007). He also wrote a highly rated book on Python.

He is the founding developer on the Crank project, a JSF/Facelets, Ajax, CRUD framework for idiomatically developing GUIs. Similar in concept to Rails and Django.

He was a Zone Leader for JavaLobby and is on the editorial board for the Java Developer's Journal (and writes for the JDJ on occasion). In addition, he writes for IBM developerWorks (Cloud computing, Google App Engine, JSF, Spring, JPA, Hibernate, Facelets, etc.)

Rick has spoken at JavaOne, XP Universe, SD West, SD East, etc., over 20 different conferences as well as being a speaker at several JUGs (Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles).

Rick has 26 software development certifications.

Rick wrote, taught and maintained the ArcMind Spring course, JSF course, Hibernate course, Ajax Course and JPA course.

Rick was on the JSF 2.0 spec committee.

Rick likes to write code, mentor, teach, manage and consult.

Rick Hightower’s Specialties:

Technical Skills

Systems enginneering, Engineering management,
Process development, Team development, Mentoring and Training.

Programming Languages: Java, C/C++/C#, Python, JavaScript, XSL/XSLT, etc.

Frameworks: Django, Grails, JavaServer Faces (JSF), Spring, Ajax, Hibernate, Tapestry, HiveMind, AspectJ, JEE, EJB 3/JPA, JMS, Servlets, JSPs, Tiles, and more

Please see http://code.google.com/p/krank/

Rick Hightower’s Experience

CEO/Founder

Mammatus Inc.

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

February 2009 — Present (10 months)

Mammatus is a training and consulting company that focuses on cloud computing, Spring, JPA and Grails.
Wrote and taught a Groovy course.
Wrote and taught a Grails course.
Wrote a series of article on Cloud Computing
Did architectural analysis on several large projects
Provided support for Hibernate tuning
Provided AspectJ mentoring
Wrote a C/GTK+/GLib based graphing package
Wrote several Python network daemons and Python equipment simulators
Wrote several Python modules in C
Embedded Python into an existing C/GTK application
Helped get a large project back on track
Consultant

Vantage Media LLC

(Privately Held; E-Learning industry)

2006 — February 2009 (3 years )

Consulted at Vantage Media for two years (while employed at ArcMind Inc.). The consulting included Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Maven and A4J consulting. Developed the Crank framework while on this project.
Consultant

Consultant at Qualcomm

(Computer Software industry)

2004 — 2009 (5 years )

Developed the Presto framework that is used on over 30 internal applications
The Presto framework is built on top of Spring, Hibernate, Acegi, JSF and AspectJ.
Wrote a series of maven plugins to generate Presto artifacts
Wrote a swing based code generator written in Groovy that generates a starter Presto application based on an existing database schema
Chief Mentor, Consultant and CTO

ArcMind

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

November 2003 — February 2009 (5 years 4 months)

Consulting, training, and mentoring for JEE, Spring, JSF, and Hibernate based web applications.

Developer on several production based web applications.

Performed Architectural Analysis at several Fortune 500 companies.

Performed emergency Hibernate performance tunning (as well as training, consulting and mentoring).

Wrote a Spring course (covers Spring MVC, JSF integration, writing Aspects, low-level IOC, JMS integration, Hibernate integration, and more).

Wrote the following: an Ajax course, a JSF course, a Hibernate course, a JPA course, a Spring white paper, a Spring course, many articles and a Tapestry course.

Developer an opensource framework for quickly building JPA based CRUD listings using Ajax, JSF, Facelets, JPA and Spring (see http://code.google.com/p/krank/).
Member

JSF JSR

(Computer Software industry)

2007 — 2008 (1 year )

Participated on the JSF JSR. The spec committee for JavaServer Faces.
Writer

IBM DeveloperWorks

(Computer Software industry)

2001 — 2008 (7 years )

Wrote tutorials and articles on Cloud Computing, JSF, Facelets, Hibernate, Spring, Web Services and more.
Convention Speaker and on Looker

Conferences

(Computer Software industry)

2001 — 2008 (7 years )

Attended many software conferences and spoke at quite a few. Over the years I spoke at No Fluff Just Stuff series of conferences, XP Universe, JavaOne, Syscon, and many more.
Consultant

LowerMyBills.com

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; expn.l; Internet industry)

2005 — 2006 (1 year )
CTO

Triveratech

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

January 2002 — November 2003 (1 year 11 months)

Trivera Technologies is a global training and consulting firm with offices in the U.S. and Europe.
Technical sales support.
Performed Consulting, Architectural analysis, Training for J2EE applications.
XP mentoring.
Developed a Struts course that became our number 1 course that year.
Updated the EJB course to include CMP/CMR coverage and MDB.
Taught courses on UML, Unified Process, XP, Advanced Java, Struts, EJB, JMS, XML, XSLT, Java/XML, Web Services, etc.
Director of Development

eBlox

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

January 2001 — January 2002 (1 year 1 month)

Lead a large team of developers to develop a large eCommerce application based on Struts, EJB 2.x and other J2EE technologies which could be deployed on Oracle, MySQL or MS SQL-Server (on Solaris, Windows NT or Linux).

Developed a corporate developer training program.

Fostered an environment of professional growth.

Helped create a winning team who could produce software products like they were going out of style.
Director of Architecture

Buzzeo

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

November 1999 — January 2001 (1 year 3 months)

As Director of Architecture at Buzzeo, Rick was responsible for adding next generation features to the ZEOLogix servers (CORBA-based EJB server) and the CORBA component wizard; talking to investors and potential customers about technology and technology vision; and leading engineering team with product and technology vision and direction. He developed a framework for writing applications that use a business rules engine, workflow, database access, CORBA and Enterprise JavaBeans. The framework uses mementos, abstract factory and other design patterns to aid in the parallel development of multi-tier applications.
Principal Software Engineer

LookSmart

(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Computer Software industry)

May 1999 — November 1999 (7 months)

Worked on critical client/server applications. Responsible for data migration to new database schemas, reporting utilities, and International Unicode conversion. Programming was done in Perl, Delphi, Python, Java, Visual Basic and T-SQL. Used ADO, OLE DB and DMO with SQL Server 7.0. Earned reputation for "consistent delivery" (called "he delivers" by director of Project Management) and leading a team to success.

Performed many DBA functions with SQL Server
Used ADO and DMO to migrate data. DMO stands for data management objects.
Worked as liaison between development, QA, DBA's, and management to ensure projects success.
Implemented process to deliver quality code to QA, and keep development moving forward.
Solved many hard problems to ensure product delivery.
Senior Software Engineer

Intel

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; INTC; Computer Software industry)

May 1996 — May 1999 (3 years 1 month)

Senior Software Engineer, Java Architecture

Focus was on Enterprise Java and CORBA systems. Responsibilities included working on proofs of concepts, prototypes and demonstrations for Intel’s distributed computing architecture vision of E-Business and balanced computing.

Earned reputation as "acknowledged Java expert across Intel".
Create several frameworks using a variety of Java, COM, CORBA, middleware technologies—frameworks used design patterns extensively.
Worked with EJB in early 1998, i.e., pre 1.0 versions of EJB.
ICBeans initiative, which I developed, was given away at last Intel Developers forum and was the basis of an Intel patent application, which I authored.

Senior Software Engineer, Factory Automation

Department CAS (Components Automation Systems a.k.a. Fab Automation).

Worked on mission critical multi-tiered software.
Lead development teams.
COM\ActiveX specialist.
Spoke on Internet programming using Java.
Software Developer

Read-Rite

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Semiconductors industry)

June 1993 — June 1996 (3 years 1 month)

Developed Software for Windows and Digital Unix platforms in C and C++.

Optimized modeling software that calculated fly height of head above disc (used Posix Threading to run modeling software on multiple CPUs).

Wrote production probing software and R&D interfacing software to communicate with LCR meters, probers and more over GPIB (HPIB) and RS-232.

Wrote wafer analysis software for popcorn noise testing.

Wrote a general purpose (high speed) graphing package for analysis of test data.

Wrote statistical analysis software to analyze new R&D designs for thin disc heads.