Rick Hightower

Current

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

Past

• Writer at DeveloperWorks
• Convention onlooker at Conferences
• 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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Recommended

92 people have recommended Rick

Connections

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Industry

Computer Software

Rick Hightower’s Summary

Rick Hightower specializes in JEE development using Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Ajax, JPA, JEE, and Oracle technologies.

Rick Hightower serves as chief technology officer for ArcMind Inc., a training and consulting firm specializing in Hibernate/JPA, JSF and Spring .

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 is the founding developer on the Crank project, a JSF/Facelets, Ajax, CRUD framework for idiomatically developing GUIs.

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 additon, he writes for IBM developerWorks (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 and has been director of development at three different software development firms as well as CTO of two different consulting/training companies before founding ArcMind Inc. in 2003.

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

He is on the JSF 2.0 spec committee.

Rick likes to write code, mentor, teach 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.

Java Technologies: 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

• Consultant

  Vantage Media LLC

  (Computer Software industry)

  2006 — Present (2 years)

• Chief Mentor, Consultant and CTO

  ArcMind

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  November 2003 — Present (4 years 11 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/).

• Writer

  DeveloperWorks

  (Computer Software industry)

  2001 — 2008 (7 years)

• Convention onlooker

  Conferences

  (Computer Software industry)

  2001 — 2008 (7 years)

• 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.

Additional Information

Rick Hightower’s Groups:

JDJ Editorial Staff, Regular Contributor to IBM developerWorks, Tucson JUG, JSF Developer, SourceBeat, No Fluff Just Stuff

•    Spring Users

Rick Hightower’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• reference requests
• getting back in touch