Stephan Schwab

Current

• Speaker at Caimito Technologies
• Product Manager, Information Architect, Product Owner, Programmer, Trainer/Mentor at Caimito Technologies

Past

• Software Developer at Serials Solutions
• Consultant at Nationwide Financial
• Developer and Agile Development Advocate at Cloud9 Analytics, Inc.

• Contract Developer at R L Polk
• Software Technology Consultant at RealWorld Systems, Inc.
• Networking and System Management (Contractor) at Innpoints Worldwide
• Senior Java Developer (Contractor) at Achieve Healthcare
• Software Technology Consultant at Impulse Point
• Developer Media Websites at Caimito Technologies
• Network and Security Consultant at Borg Warner Automotive
• Developer CCMBS at Caimito Technologies
• Founder, CEO at DINX GmbH
• Co-Founder, CEO at Farside Communications
• Co-Founder, CEO at VentureNET
• Co-Owner, Software Architect at SoftStream Development

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Education

• Universität Dortmund

Recommended

5 people have recommended Stephan

Connections

83 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• My Company
• My Blog

Stephan Schwab’s Summary

German Software Technology Consultant living in Panama by choice who has broad and long-term experience of more than 20 years with a great number of technologies. That's usually hard to find.

My specialty is helping development teams with their development infrastructure, agile process (Scrum/XP), how to handle current technologies (Spring, ORM, web frameworks, desktop UIs). Further I do code reviews and can become a full-time member of a team to speed up or restart a stalled development effort.

Another way to benefit from my experience is to hire me for advise. If you are a CIO, CTO or a team facing a difficult technical decision and are looking for a first or second opinion, I'm happy to help you.

- Custom software development using agile practices
- Training on Agile Development, Java Technologies, true object-oriented programming, test-driven development (TDD)
- Systems design and review (user interface, database, network, security)

Besides providing these professional services as consultant I lead a team of developers in my Panama office who are working on a new agile project management and collaboration tool called Savila. Further I speak occasionally at user groups and Universidad Tecnologica in Panama.

Stephan Schwab’s Specialties:

Software Development, Development Team Management, Network Design, Network Security, Intrusion Detection and Prevention, Technical Analysis, Product and System Architecture, Agile Development Process Scrum, Spring Framework, Hibernate, ORM, Java, C++, J2EE, JMS, JMX

Fluent in English, German (1st language) and Spanish.

Stephan Schwab’s Experience

• Speaker

  Caimito Technologies

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  2007 — Present (2 years)

  Speaker at various events:
  
  November 2007
  - Tampa JUG: Agile Development Organization
  - Miami JUG: Agile Development Organization
  - Atlanta JUG: Software Development in Panama
  
  December 2007:
  - Conference PanamaJUG: Scrum and Savila
  
  September 2008
  - IEEE Panama, Dia del Programador at Universidad Tecnologica: Agile Development

• Product Manager, Information Architect, Product Owner, Programmer, Trainer/Mentor

  Caimito Technologies

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  2003 — Present (6 years)

  Development of Savila, an Agile Project Management and Collaboration tool for colocated and geographically distributed teams.
  
  Savila is being developed in week-long Scrum sprints. I create wireframes for UI design and user story development. I train and mentor a team of three programmers. As I'm the product visionary as well I play the roles of stakeholder and Product Owner before and during sprint planning.
  
  Savila has been released as Caimito One Team 1.0 in September 2008.
  
  Technologies used: Java 5, Tapestry 5 web framework, Spring application framework, Hibernate as JPA implementation, Maven2, Selenium, Continuum, Tomcat, Jetty

• Software Developer

  Serials Solutions

  (Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

  June 2008 — June 2009 (1 year 1 month)

  Worked as part of a small geographically distributed and international team to create Serials Solutions' new product Summon - a unified discovery service for libraries providing a Google-like search experience to researchers - from early prototyping to final commercial launch. Summon indexes and makes available for search more than half a billion documents.
  
  My contributions to the project include evaluations of technologies, building prototypes, promoting good development practices, and building core content processing and storage modules.
  
  Technologies used:
  Apache Camel, Apache ActiveMQ, MySQL, high-performance JDBC, Hibernate, Tapestry IoC and Tapestry 5, JRuby Java integration, Maven, Team City, XML, XQuery, Apache Solr search engine

• Consultant

  Nationwide Financial

  (Public Company; NFS; Financial Services industry)

  February 2008 — June 2008 (5 months)

  Lead other tech leads in the definition of construction models and stories. Assisted other architects with defining lightweight, testing-friendly solutions, leading evolutionary design and iterative development, while conforming as necessary to corporate standards and guidelines. Did team assessments. Helped team to set up effective development environments. Organized dependencies and issues around promotion to test environment.

• Developer and Agile Development Advocate

  Cloud9 Analytics, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Services industry)

  August 2007 — December 2007 (5 months)

  Built Cloud9's Messenger product (webapp) (from inception to deployment to production) using Scrum as methodology and supported by our own agile project managed tool Savila. Other technologies used include Maven, Tapestry, Spring, JPA via Hibernate, Velocity, Apache POI and JMS. Worked directly with marketing as the internal customer. Helped and trained Cloud9's stakeholders on writing user stories; acted as Product Owner besides being developer. Introduced techniques just as continuous integration, test-driven development and being agile in general. Helped with deployment questions and provided general technical insight.

• Contract Developer

  R L Polk

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  April 2007 — May 2007 (2 months)

  Built a web application using SpringMVC and Hibernate. Provided training to other developers. Work was done remotely.

• Software Technology Consultant

  RealWorld Systems, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Financial Services industry)

  May 2006 — January 2007 (9 months)

  Trained a team of Panamanian Junior Developers on the Scrum development process and the use of Spring/Hibernate/JMS/JMX/Swing/Lingo and more to build an Option Trading System from scratch. Training was given in Spanish, while communication with management was in English.

• Networking and System Management (Contractor)

  Innpoints Worldwide

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Leisure, Travel & Tourism industry)

  February 2006 — September 2006 (8 months)

  Designed, built and operated a server farm based on HP blade servers and Ubuntu Linux for a transactional system written in Java. Established VPN between client's headquarters, contractors and the server farm hosted at a colocation facility.

• Senior Java Developer (Contractor)

  Achieve Healthcare

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Hospital & Health Care industry)

  December 2005 — February 2006 (3 months)

  As part of a 3 developer team I built the back-end for the customer's 5 years old healthcare web application written in Java. The back-end receives Faxes via email, converts them into PDF files and stores the PDFs on a file server and metadata about the faxes in a SQL database.

• Software Technology Consultant

  Impulse Point

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  June 2005 — November 2005 (6 months)

  Developed prototypes for an endpoint security product on Mac OS X and Linux (KDE/GNOME). Worked on a product specification for a multi-platform security product. Did Unix system level programming. Developed interactive web pages for the company's security product using Ajax and Java. Tutored other developers and support personnel in the areas of directory services and network security.

• Developer Media Websites

  Caimito Technologies

  (Privately Held; Myself Only; Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2004 — December 2004 (1 year)

  * Portal like websites reporting sales and to manage content
  For the internal use of clients who want to sell softgoods I develop portal like web applications that present sales data, enable to drill-down and to manage the content on sale.
  
  Technologies and tools used: CCMBS, Java, Javascript, Struts framework
  
  * Sales platforms for professional photographers and media companies
  Using my own content management framework I create web applications that enable photographers and media companies to sell their softgoods over the Internet. This includes customizing the software to support various payment providers.
  
  Further I teached web designers how to layout pages that can be used as views (JSPs) for the web application.
  
  Technologies and tools used: CCMBS, Java, Javascript, Struts framework

• Network and Security Consultant

  Borg Warner Automotive

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Computer & Network Security industry)

  1999 — 2003 (4 years)

  At Borg-Warner Germany I worked as advisor to the interim head of IT. Later I helped to deploy Windows 2000 with Active Directory and to integrate the German infrastructure via VPN into the world-wide network that the US part of BW was planning by that time.
  
  I trained several of their IT employees that had only experience with running a mainframe used to run SAP R/2 ERP system. I helped with some interconnectivity things around SAP R/3. I have some basic knowledge how to setup and administer R/3 infrastructure services.
  
  Until termination of my contract and takeover of my duties by their US based IT department I was responsible for the operation of their Internet connection, intra- company WAN/VPN (several sites in Germany with connections to sites in other countries) and security perimeter (firewall, mail-relay, proxy-server).

• Developer CCMBS

  Caimito Technologies

  (Privately Held; Myself Only; Information Technology and Services industry)

  July 2003 — December 2003 (6 months)

  Caimito Content Management and Billing System (CCMBS)
  
  The CCMBS is designed to create and operate interactive paysites with images and videos. It contains a billing module that can charge customers per item or using different subscription models. Various payment gateways for credit/debit card processing, direct debit to German bank accounts and alternative payment methods are supported. The content management module permits batch upload and processing of content. Images are scaled on the fly and put into an presentation content cache. Websites built with CCMBS can be freely customized.
  
  Technologies and tools used: Java, Struts framework, JUnit, ImageMagick, MySQL database, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, Apache HTTP server, Apache Tomcat Web-Container

• Founder, CEO

  DINX GmbH

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  2001 — April 2003 (2 years)

  Founder of DINX GmbH, an Internet Service Provider, in Frankfurt, Germany.
  
  Hosting of Application Servers
  Planning, deployment and operations of hosting services using Windows 2000 server, various Linux distributions, FreeBSD and Netscreen firewall appliances.
  
  Operations of IP Backbone and access concentrators
  Multi site backbone with BGP peers and OSPF internally. Support of a hosting farm. All Cisco equipment.
  
  Web development
  Various solutions for customers using runtime environments like Microsoft Windows with IIS and coding in ASP with SQL Server or MSDE as backend; Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Java, PHP and MS SQL Server or MySQL as backend.

• Co-Founder, CEO

  Farside Communications

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  1997 — 2001 (4 years)

  Co-founder of regional ISP Farside Communications for the region Rhein-Neckar in the southern part of Germany.
  
  Architectured an ISP provisioning, billing and accounting software in three tiers with SQL Server as backend, COM/DCOM objects as middleware and ASP pages as website frontend. Customers could signup on a website. Features included automated domain registrations, IP address administration, dialup and DSL service provisioning, inventory of CPE units, accounting of usage based on time or data volume and billing.
  
  Plannend, implemented and operated an Internet backbone built with Cisco and Ascend equipment. The backbone consisted of 4 intra-city distribution hubs for DSLAMs and several BGP connections to other carriers.
  
  Designed, deployed and maintained security systems including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, virtual private networks on a national and international scale.

• Co-Founder, CEO

  VentureNET

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

  1995 — 1996 (1 year)

  Co-Founded VentureNET GmbH in Heidelberg, Germany, together with Heidelberg based consulting company OSS Consulting GmbH and two partners Served as member of the board and was responsible for the company's Internet division.

• Co-Owner, Software Architect

  SoftStream Development

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

  1989 — 1996 (7 years)

  Software development in Modula-2 and C/C++ on GEM and Windows.
  
  Convince, an illustration and presentation graphics program was developed from 1989-1990 and marketed in Germany. It was written in Modula-2 for the GEM/3 environment on DR-DOS and MS-DOS.
  
  We developed a software technology in C/C++ on Windows 3.0 that is a little bit comparable to OLE 2 from Microsoft. Our product knew a container application with software components running inside. Available software components were a spreadsheet, illustration graphics, presentation graphics and a word-processing component from a third party.

Stephan Schwab’s Education

• Universität Dortmund

  1989 — 1991

Additional Information

Stephan Schwab’s Websites:

• My Company
• My Blog

Stephan Schwab’s Interests:

Technology, Piloting, Nature, Languages, Travel, Photography

Stephan Schwab’s Groups:

•    Agilistas
•    J Architect
•    Agile Coaching
•    Polyglot-Multilingual Professionals (350+ Members)
•    Apache Tapestry web framework

Stephan Schwab’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch