Experienced leader of software development and support teams.
Responsible for the design, construction and deployment phases of projects, ensuring the delivery of technical solutions that met business requirements, that are scalable, maintainable and are delivered on time, within budget and with quality.
Led multi-site development and support with multiple teams and projects concurrently. Responsible for staff assignments, development and performance reviews, hiring and firing.
Created and monitored budgets for projects up to $2M.
Experienced with Waterfall, V, Scrum and Iterative models. A champion of agile methodology, bringing change to established teams.
Maintained a 3-tier 24x7 operational support organization responsible for internal customer support
Excellent written and verbal communication, especially writing technical designs focused on business goals.
Worked closely with vendors including FAST, Endeca, Teragram, BEA, Borland. An advocate for the expansion of enterprise search beyond the whitebar.
Most experience with J2EE, JSP, Struts, Solaris, Oracle 9i/10g databases, Hibernate. Strong Experience also with Spring, LINUX, MySQL, Perl, XML, XSLT, REST SOA. SCM experience with Subversion, Starteam, ClearCase.
World Book
Lead Developer December, 2008 to present
Managed an off-shore J2EE development team for the online versions of World Book's encyclopedia products and other educational databases.
Redesigned the account management system enabling the sales force to sell additional products to existing customers and improve reporting.
Created a text-to-speech feature, converting an operating expense into a new revenue stream.
Defined the strategy for expanding the use of the Endeca enterprise search engine both on customer-facing applications and internal tools.
Tribune Company
Software Development Manager May, 2001 to to June, 2008
Sr. Applications Developer August, 1999 to May, 2001
Concurrently managed development and support teams for Tribune newspaper and TV websites. J2EE framework using WebLogic/Oracle Application servers, Oracle DB, TopLink data persistence and FAST enterprise search to provide high-availability, high-throughput applications, 900M pageviews/month.
Last project was to implement data taxonomies. New features derived from taxonomies contributed to 30% increase in pageviews on newspaper sites through search engine optimization and increased customer retention.
Other key projects include enterprise search, web services and internal content management tools.
Managed development for launch of new Tribune sites hosted by classified partners.
Lead developer for the Enterprise Feed Engine, a back-office Java/Oracle/XML/XSLT application for parsing, storing and exporting data feeds, including news and classifieds, from multiple sources to multiple destinations.
Motorola
Senior Software Engineer December, 1997 to July, 1999
Software Engineer II December, 1995 to December, 1997
Software Engineer I June, 1994 to December, 1995
Developer for wireless telecommunication infrastructure for the iDEN platform for use by Nextel, and created derivatives for the Iridium and TETRA platforms using C++, C, and Informix.
Active in all levels of development: requirements, design, coding, test documentation, testing, and user documentation, using a V-model lifecycle, structured methods, and issue-driven technical reviews.
Pioneered the Web for iDEN: moved product documentation online, maintained a web server, created online intranet applications for the development process and training.
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, 1994
Chicago Bronze
President and Volunteer Member April, 1999 to Present
Chicago Bronze is a non-profit performance group of English handbell ringers. The 14-member ensemble performs at public and private events throughout the year.
As President, responsible for all business functions of the corporation and fulfilling the group's mission of promoting handbell music.