Summary

Over twenty years' experience designing and implementing software to manage, search, and analyze large datasets efficiently and rapidly, resulting in the production of three commercial database management systems.

Skills

Domain analysis and algorithm design; performance tuning; object-oriented design; mathematical modeling; porting; writing and editing; teaching and mentoring.

C, C++ (STL, Standard Library) expert, Microsoft Visual Studio, Borland C++ Builder, GCC, Qt.

Employment

Feb 1997 – present

Self-employed Software Developer

Customers include:

Feb 1997 – May 2003, Mar 2006 – present

Archi-Tech Systems (www.archi-tech.com), W. Trenton, NJ

• Archi-Tech produces marketing research tools for pharmaceutical companies. Their first products were based on Dataware’s ADL; by 1997, they needed an engine more capable of managing the larger (tens of gigabytes) datasets they would soon see.

• Designed and built the InPress a database engine for large, structured, primarily numeric, datasets; the backend for Archi-Tech’s products. InPress’s performance is often orders of magnitude better than the Oracle-based tools it has supplanted. It is now used by most major pharmaceutical companies.

• Built add-ons to do statistical analysis and mining of prescription data using InPress.

• Added support for some relational features (e.g., join).

• Built data verification tools based on InPress.

• Participated in the UI design of the tools (e.g. DART) written atop InPress.

• Created documentation and a tutorial for building DART applications

• Designed and built a next-generation database engine for larger, more deeply structured datasets. This multi-threaded engine runs on 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux.

• Original system was written with Borland C++ Builder; the next generation with Microsoft Visual C++, GCC, and Qt.

• Assisted Archi-Tech in hiring and training.

Jun – Dec 2005

Overtone Software (www.overtonesoftware.com), Bethesda, MD

• Prototyped a high-performance backup system for Oracle tables, in Microsoft Visual C++.

Sep 2003 – Dec 2005

Open Text Corporation (www.opentext.com), Waterloo, Ontario

• Developed a new XML- and web-based, multi-threaded version of CDAuthor (database authoring), and ADL (search and retrieval API). OpenText acquired CDAuthor and ADL from Dataware (see below) in 1999.

• System consists of a web server; a collection of standard DLLs to manage data storage, indexing, and retrieval; and a configurable framework for loading the standard DLLs, as well as coordinating custom DLLs.

• Data store and indexer are optimized for both text (Unicode) and numeric data.

• Search engine supports Boolean, range, truncation, and wildcard searches.

• Written in Borland C++ Builder and Microsoft Visual C++.

Oct 1997 – Mar 2000

Dataware Technologies, Cambridge, MA

• Bug fixes and enhancements to products on which I had worked while employed by Dataware, in particular CDAuthor and the ADL. Wrote an add-on to the ADL to support reading, indexing, and searching XML data.

Feb – Dec, 1998

Cooper’s & Lybrand, Arlington, VA

• Wrote a decision-support system to help Coopers & Lybrand’s customers select health insurance plans.

Jul 1987 - -Feb 1997

Dataware Technologies, Munich, Germany, and Cambridge, MA

Software Engineer, Lead Architect

• Designed and wrote (with one other developer) CDAuthor and CDAnswer, the first database authoring and retrieval system for CD-ROM. Written in Borland C.

• Designed and wrote (with two other developers) the ADL (Advanced Design Library), Dataware’s retrieval engine. Areas of concentration included presentation formatting, hit highlighting, memory management, search resolution, and performance optimization. Ported much of the ADL to VMS, Unix, and MacOS, and from Borland to Microsoft C.

• Conceived and built add-ons for the ADL to manage time-series data, and worked closely with the IMF and World Bank to deploy their time-series databases (including International Financial Statistics and World Development Indicators) on CD-ROM and later online. The system collected economic and financial data from diverse sources, and compressed, indexed, and presented it for analysis.

• Managed the Information Authoring group (five developers).

Jun 1985 – Jun 1987

Western Connecticut State University (WCSU), Danbury, CT

Consultant

• Designed and built data-capture tools for WCSU’s Weather Center.

• Specified, designed, and built an automated severe-weather forecasting system, using a proprietary meteorological model based on numerical solution of differential equations, and detection of higher-order atmospheric discontinuities. The system, written in C, running on a MicroVAX under VMS, captured data in real-time from a satellite feed, and incrementally ran the model as new data became available.

Aug 1985 – Dec 1986

Data General Corporation, Westboro, MA, and Durham, NC

Software Engineer

• Helped design, and began to implement, the virtual machine for a Java-like interpreted language, part of an integrated set of software engineering tools.

Education

B.S., Applied Math (Computer Software)

Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

1985