resume for Tom Howland <Tom@TomZilla.org> West San Jose, CA
Objective
Software Engineer
Qualifications
Background
web applications, text mining, compilers, case tools, GUI, and network software.
Platforms
Linux & Windows
Experience
BMC Software, San Jose, California, 2009-08-10 to now. Lead Product Developer
We specialize in monitoring and provisioning the cloud.
  • Both Architect & Project lead for adding Single-Sign-On capabilities to several applications
  • Designed, implemented, documented, and fielded a program that migrates knowlege bases. Patent pending.
  • lots of customer support of an event monitoring system
National Semiconductor, Santa Clara, California, 2007-07-20 to 2009-08-07. Senior Software Engineer
  • Systems Analyst for a large project involving the automation of the 8-D process for National. This involved work project management, requirements definition, testing coordination, Oracle PL/SQL, nightly jobs, coordination of builds from the corporate data warehouse, and so on.
  • Designed and implemented several enhancements to the Green Compliance application -- a Struts based web application (j2ee)
  • Cognos Reporting for the Product Quality Analysis project -- this was mostly staging work in Oracle. I have cognos training in Report Studio & Framework Manager.
MindBox, Greenbrae, CA, 2005-05-31 to 2007-07-31. Senior Consultant
Mindbox consults to mortgage brokers using expert systems technology. I was trained in using their forward chaining rule engine ART, but ended up spending most of my time doing J2EE work including the creation of a web service for translating credit reports from an old binary form to a standardized XML form.
3Plus1, Saratoga, CA. 1/1/05 to 5/27/05. Member of Staff
  • Created proprietary extensions to VeriLog
  • Designed and implemented testing framework
  • System Administrator
  • Build God
Kaidara, Los Altos, CA. 5/1/02 to 10/31/03. Senior Software Engineer
  • Implemented and fielded a very responsive, game-like Java Swing interface to a text mining application.
  • implemented a web-based editor for natural language processing using DOM and Struts.
XACCT, Santa Clara, CA. 5/00 to 5/02. Member of Staff
XACCT is the premier IP mediation vendor. Telecommunications companies use XACCT software to gather the data upon which they base their billing. Designed and implemented

  • a high performance aggregator - if you are familiar with the aggregation operators of SQL think of this as aggregations on a continuous stream of data. Written in C++ and the Standard Template Library
  • multi point quality of service - a carrier can only identify quality of service issues in his network by making measurements at two or more points in his network. Doing this passively (without injecting information into the network for measurement) was the point of this product. Written in a Java framework.
  • a portal interface to a business intelligence application. Web Services and JSP Tag Libraries.
Price Waterhouse, Menlo Park, CA. 5/97 to 5/00.
I worked on a web application called "EdgarScan". It is a text mining application. It extracts financial tables and other structured information from the free text of SEC filings. To make the whole thing work requires competence in parsing techniques in Prolog, GUI & database access in Java, HTML generation in Prolog, HTML generation in Java Servlets, Oracle SQL, C & Perl, and so on.

I had a hand in the creation of an XML-based Financial Reporting Markup Language.
IBM, Santa Teresa, CA. 11/95 to 5/97. Advisory Programmer.
I worked on a product called DataHub. It manages large (~1000) heterogeneous nodes providing monitoring and database administration. It is a relatively small (60,000 lines) collection of small Prolog programs. I implemented its client-based monitoring systems and ported it to NT.
Sterling Software, Inc, Redwood City, CA. 1/95 to 10/95. Senior Software Engineer.
Sterling bought my former employer, KnowledgeWare. I designed and implementing a desktop integration product using Visual C++ and an embedded BASIC. It was a "container" application that relied heavily on OLE and OCX's. Much of my time was devoted to embedding BASIC in a "smart" container application.
KnowledgeWare, Inc, Redwood City, CA. 3/93 to 12/94, Senior Software Engineer.
KWI is a CASE vendor. It is considered the premier CASE tool for MIS applications. The heart of the software is a Prolog program called "Cool" that does constraint checking and code generation. I was hired to port this to UNIX and to connect it to a generic graphical user interface C++ library under UNIX. In the process I wrote
but that was the fun stuff. Mostly I fixed bugs, of which there seemed to be an endless supply in our C++ code.
Quintus Corporation, Mountain View, CA. 9/88 to 2/92, Software Engineer.
Quintus was a Prolog compiler company that switched to help-desk applications around the time I left and then imploded in 2001.
  • Ported Quintus Prolog from SUN UNIX to VAX/VMS. This involved extensive work with C, X-Windows, GNU EMACS, VAX assembly language, and translating various UNIX system calls to VMS system calls.
  • Internationalized input/output for Prolog.
  • Wrote a tcp package which is used to easily implement inter-process communication over networks. It allows a course-grain parallelism with arbitrarily many processes running on different machines. This works on all POSIX (a subset of UNIX system calls) implementations.
  • Researched multitasking and declarative graphics.
  • Provided technical support on basic techniques in logic programming and software engineering.
Visual Intelligence Corporation, Cambridge, MA, 4/89 to 6/89, consultant
On a SUN 3/60, I built applications around the interactive drawing package "DataViews", which is a tool or "interface builder" for quickly building multi-screened real-time monitoring applications.
Lockheed, Artificial Intelligence Center, Menlo Park, CA. 11/83 to 9/88, Senior Scientific Programmer
  • Wrote an asynchronous user-interface for multiprocessing applications in Ada.
  • Wrote three programming language translators: FORTRAN to FORTRAN77 PL/I to Pascal, and PL/I to Ada. The PL/I to Ada translator was the most comprehensive. It was a recursive descent translator which understood data flow and used type inheritance. It was found to be 98% accurate, which is very good for translators.
  • Tutored A.I. and Knowledge Engineering techniques in the "mentor program."
  • Developed a graphics interface to an expert system (menus, trees, active values, real-time monitors) using Visual Intelligence Corporation's "DataViews."
  • Led a project for generic model based reasoning using a LISP based constraint language.
  • Extended a generic expert system shell to fit multiprocessor problem solving. This involved work in both tcp/ip and DECNET.
  • Extended the natural language Prolog program "Chat" to handle deictics, under the tutelage of its author: Fernando Periera.
  • Wrote a natural language front end to an expert system using semantic grammars to map to case frames.
  • Wrote benchmarks for various expert system shells.
Education
Santa Clara University -- Santa Clara, CA. 1984 - 1985

Post Graduate Studies

Studies stressed artificial intelligence. Favorite projects: writing in Prolog a planner for a robot controller and writing in LISP a logic based expert system building tool like Stanford's MRS.

The Ohio State University -- Columbus, OH
  • B.S. Computer and Information Science -- June, 1983
  • B.S. Physics -- June 1981
Skills
Tables like this are pretty lame since the important thing is how quickly you pick up new technologies but for completeness:

Skill Proficiency Years
Scala Beginner 0.1
Cognos Competent 0.5
Java Expert 7
J2EE API's such as JNDI, HTTPServlet Expert 7
C Expert 7
Perl Expert 7
Prolog Expert 7
PL/SQL Expert 2
Development Tools (Make, Ant, CVS, XMLSpy, JBuilder, Eclipse, StarTeam, Visual C++, etc.) Expert 7
Web technologies (DOM, EJB, HTML, J2EE, JavaScript, JSP, RMI, STRUTS, XML, XSL) Expert 7