Michael Van Riper

Current

Founder & Leader at Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group
Chief Web Technologist at Krillion, Inc.
Local Ambassador at UXnet

Co-Chair at BayDUX
Founder & Leader at Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG
Steering Committee Member at BayCHI

see less...

3 more...

Past

Sr. Software Engineer at VeriSign
Sr. Software Engineer at Finaline Technologies
Sr. Software Engineer at Tirata/Soltima

Sr. Software Engineer at Icarian
Sr. Software Engineer at Adobe Systems
Sr. Software Engineer at Taligent
Sr. Software Engineer at Apple Computer
Sr. Software Engineer at Metaphor
Software Engineer at Hewlett Packard

see less...

6 more...

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Recommended

4 people have recommended Michael

Connections

491 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Michael Van Riper’s Summary

The common thread running through my entire career is working with the latest technologies to deliver the best user experiences possible.

NOTE: I prefer to directly connect with people that I know and trust, but am open to introductions and InMail from anyone.

Michael Van Riper’s Specialties:

Object-Oriented Programming, Web Tier Application Development, Interaction Design

Michael Van Riper’s Experience

Founder & Leader

Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group

(Non-Profit; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

January 2008 — Present (1 year 11 months)

The Silicon Valley GTUG meets on the first Wednesday of the month at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, California. This is the first GTUG to be established in the United States. I am one of the founders and also one of the leaders of this group. As one of the leaders, I recruit speakers and handle meeting logistics for a monthly meeting of 100-200 people each month.
Chief Web Technologist

Krillion, Inc.

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

May 2006 — Present (3 years 7 months)

Krillion's mission is to revolutionize the way ready-to-buy consumers find national brands, locally. I selected our backend technology and implemented the initial web application architecture for our services including the support for Friendly URLs and Ajax. My current new architecture work is focused on extending our web services into the mobile space.
Local Ambassador

UXnet

(Non-Profit; 51-200 employees; Design industry)

August 2004 — Present (5 years 4 months)

The UXnet (User Experience Network) mission is fostering cooperation and collaboration among the many organizations that serve the international user experience design community. I am one of several UXnet Local Ambassadors for the San Francisco Bay Area. See http://uxnet.org/locales for more information about UXnet locales and the associated Local Ambassadors.
Co-Chair

BayDUX

(Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Design industry)

August 2004 — Present (5 years 4 months)

BayDUX is a coalition of San Francisco Bay Area professional organizations that deal with user experience design. The UXnet (User Experience Network) mission is fostering cooperation and collaboration among the many organizations that serve the international user experience design community. Since UXnet and BayDUX share common goals, BayDUX serves as the local presence for UXnet. BayDUX co-chairs also serve as UXnet Local Ambassadors. See baydux.org for more information.
Founder & Leader

Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG

(Non-Profit; 501-1000 employees; Internet industry)

April 2003 — Present (6 years 8 months)

Originally, this group was for anyone interested in learning more about the Struts web application framework. This JUG continues to serve user interface engineers who use the Struts framework to design and develop web applications. As of July 2004, we have broadened our focus to also include more general coverage of other J2EE web application development technologies. Meetings are free and open to the public. For more information, see https://sv-web-jug.dev.java.net.
Steering Committee Member

BayCHI

(Non-Profit; Computer Software industry)

January 1996 — Present (13 years 11 months)

My initial involvement was to coordinate Birds-Of-a-Feather (BOF) groups for BayCHI. We started with one BOF with less than 100 members and grew to eight BOFs with a combined membership in excess of 600 participants during my first few years in this role. I stepped down from the BOF Chair role in April of 2009. I also served as the elected Vice Chair in 1998 and as the elected Chair in 2003. I am currently a BayCHI Liaison to BayDUX and co-manager of the BayCHI Group on LinkedIn.
Sr. Software Engineer

VeriSign

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; VRSN; Internet industry)

April 2002 — May 2006 (4 years 2 months)

Initially, I was part of a small team responsible for common management framework code used across all retail and enterprise security services. This framework effort involved all application tiers. My focus was on the presentation layer aspects of client-side and server-side web application development using Java/JSP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript

Since then, I have taken a lead role in the development of multiple web applications that use the Struts framework, the Spring container and SiteMesh. Most recently, my focus has shifted from Struts to WebWork as the MVC framework in my work. Within the security services engineering department, I am recognized as the source for web application development expertise.

From May of 2005 to May of 2006, I also served as VeriSign's primary delegate to the Unicode Consortium.
Sr. Software Engineer

Finaline Technologies

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

November 2001 — March 2002 (5 months)

Hired as team lead for web application development. During my first month on the job, I dramatically improved the application build process and evaluated a third-party multi-dimensional data reporting tool. My next assignment was to take the existing minimal web application interface and produce an alpha release with just 4 weeks for design and implementation. I successfully led a team of four engineers to deliver a functionally complete web application interface on schedule.

My personal contributions to this alpha release during the three week implementation phase were: enhancing a Swing-based database administration tool to manage web application data, designing the HTML layout scheme used for the web application and writing custom tags to dynamically generate HTML responses using JSP technology.
Sr. Software Engineer

Tirata/Soltima

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

October 2000 — October 2001 (1 year 1 month)

At Tirata, we developed a Conversation Engine and prototyped several applications using this engine. Engineering work involved the following technologies: Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java Server Pages (JSP), XML, XSLT, HTML and WML. I designed and implemented reports using Entity beans and Session beans.

After acquisition by Soltima, three of us produced a working demonstration of a community content publishing application in just two weeks. After that, I worked on the 3.0 release of Soltima's Service Package Manager. A web application interface for Soltima's wireless publishing platform. This was a JSP Model 2 architecture application using the Struts framework. I worked on both the JSP pages and the Java classes that defined model actions. The JSP work involved significant JSP tab library development. In particular, I designed and implemented tags to dynamically generate a DHTML explorer UI for hierarchical category data.
Sr. Software Engineer

Icarian

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

March 1999 — September 2000 (1 year 7 months)

Principal architect of the Presentation Layer, one piece of Icarian's next generation architecture for web applications. Member of a small team that built a reference implementation of this new architecture using EJB, JSP, XML, XSLT, JavaScript and HTML. Lead engineer during the development of the production version of the Presentation Layer component of this architecture.

Senior web application engineer for eWorkforce 2.0. This service runs over the Internet using a thin web-client interface. Worked in server-side Java to process requests and populate HTML templates with data coming from business objects that encapsulated a back-end database. Worked on the HTML templates too. HTML 3.2 and JavaScript 1.1 was used in the coding of these templates. Responsible for the administrative functions, searching functions, and additive workflow functions in eWorkforce 2.0.
Sr. Software Engineer

Adobe Systems

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; ADBE; Computer Software industry)

January 1996 — October 1998 (2 years 10 months)

Project lead responsible for core web-authoring functionality in PageMill 3.0 for Windows and Macintosh. Lead interface designer in addition to engineering responsibilities. My personal engineering contributions in 3.0 were site-wide search functionality, improved table editing functions, and the web-safe color palette. Interface design changes included a major redesign of the menus and toolbars. Added extensive support for right mouse button activated context-sensitive menus. Many minor usability enhancements were also made.

Project lead on PageMill 2.0 Windows engineering team. Focus of this effort was to reproduce same functionality as the Macintosh product with as much shared code as possible. Member of SiteMill 1.0 and PageMill 2.0 engineering teams for Macintosh. Worked on HTML parser/writer to support tables, frames and fonts. Made significant text engine changes to support new font capabilities. Added animated GIF and client-side image map functionality.
Sr. Software Engineer

Taligent

(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Computer Software industry)

October 1991 — December 1995 (4 years 3 months)

Member of engineering team customizing the CommonPoint application system for Windows NT and Windows '95. Responsible for text, international utilities, and user interface development tools.

Created several innovative text tools. Co-designer and sole implementor of text storage classes used pervasively in the system. Member of three person team that produced the text editing component of the CommonPoint application system. Played major role in getting new text formatter ready on time for Beta release. Co-designer of major enhancements to the cursor tool architecture for the next release.

Text user interface engineer for the Pink operating system project. Developed a user interface prototype for an internationally-enabled text engine. Stayed with the project when it was transferred to Taligent as part of the Apple and IBM joint venture.
Sr. Software Engineer

Apple Computer

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; AAPL; Computer Software industry)

April 1991 — September 1991 (6 months)

The reason for my short tenure at Apple was because I was hired into the Pink project that was spun out as Taligent, an Apple/IBM joint venture, a few months after I was hired. I went with the rest of the members of the Pink project to the newly formed privately held joint venture company.
Sr. Software Engineer

Metaphor

(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Computer Software industry)

April 1988 — March 1991 (3 years )

Patriot Partners developer focusing on end user applications. Investigated application components for improving developer productivity in an object-oriented system.

Project lead responsible for text and graphics applications. Managed and co-developed a major enhancement to a business charting tool. Promoted to Manager of Text and Graphics in January of 1990. Managed the initial development of two major applications: an integrated text and graphics product and an on-line help facility.

Co-designer and sole implementor of new end-user tool, PC Directory. This tool provided a nested folder view of DOS file systems. It enabled data transfer between the network file server and the workstation's local disk in a simple and intuitive manner. Began implementation after only two months at Metaphor. Functionally complete code was delivered four months later. Product was recognized internally for exemplary documentation and test plan.
Software Engineer

Hewlett Packard

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

August 1980 — March 1988 (7 years 8 months)

Project lead in development of conversion programs for HP's word processing products written for Microsoft Windows and HP NewWave. Conversion efforts focused on the IBM Document Content Architecture (DCA) format.

Member of development team that created an interactive and WYSIWYG report generator for both HP and IBM personal computers. Project was recognized for its use of engineering "best practices" to achieve high productivity during development and high quality in final product.

Project lead in development of business presentation graphics packages, Series 100 Graphics and Charting Gallery, for the HP150 personal computer. Used state-machine concepts to make the product event-driven.

Michael Van Riper’s Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

B.S.E.E. , Computer Science , 1976 — 1980

Activities and Societies:

Lambda Chi Alpha, MIT LCA

Additional Information

Michael Van Riper’s Websites:

Michael Van Riper’s Interests:

yoga, pilates, hiking, swimming, biking

Michael Van Riper’s Groups:

Hewlett-Packard Alumni Association, SIGCHI, BayCHI, BayDUX, UXnet, Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG, Lambda Chi Alpha, MIT LCA, Linking Northern California, JUG Leaders