Resume

Objective

I seek a challenging position as a senior technical staff member where I can use and extend the programming, computer networking and problem solving skills I've developed throughout my career.

Education

California State University, Fullerton, August, 1996. Master of Science, Computer Science. Master's project was the basis for a paper presented at SAC '98 titled File Hoarding under NFS and Linux. Designed and implemented a disconnected file cache manager in C under Linux.

Scripps College, Claremont, California, May, 1989. Bachelor of Arts, English with honors, minor in Computer Science. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California. 1984-1987. Coursework in physics, mathematics and computer science.

Professional Experience

Software Engineer
May, 2006 - Current
University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Develop, test, and debug software and systems supporting campus and Pacific Northwest Gigapop network equipment. Write, extend and repair database-driven tools in Perl, Java and Expect, with web interfaces in Perl's CGI.pm and JSP. Network technologies and protocols include SNMP, CORBA, TL1 and netflow.

Core Network Engineer
April, 2003 - May, 2006
CENIC, Cypress, California

Responsible for network design and deployment of optical, switching and routing equipment. Participated in regular on-call rotation and provided last tier network escalation support. Other projects included writing documentation, programming web-based tools, and configuring and customizing network management applications.

• Recent Deployment work Completed and refined vendor provided optical network redesign of our Southern California inland path. Specified, configured and installed equipment for new backbone hubsites. Tested and deployed all optical equipment at hubsites and at line amplifier sites and worked with remote hands to cut live traffic over to new equipment during nighttime maintenance windows.

• Escalation responsibilities Assisted operations engineers with problems on Cisco router and switching equipment, Juniper router equipment, and Cisco ONS 15540, 15454 and 15808 DWDM optical equipment. Worked directly with customer or vendor to address persistent problems.

• Operational tools Installed and maintained both commercial and open source tools used by our network operations center, including Cisco Transport Manager, the RT trouble ticket system, TWiki, tac_plus. Designed and implemented a database-based network documentation website using perl, Class::DBI and mysql.

Director of Systems
January, 2000 - April, 2003
Idealab, Pasadena, California

Managed a small team responsible for all telecommunications, colocation, computer security, network and systems management. The group also provided desktop support and IT consulting expertise to Idealab companies in development.

A major project involved implementing office LANs, deploying the inter-office frame/T1 WAN using OSPF and BGP, and designing server rooms for new offices in Boston, Manhattan and Palo Alto. Coordinated decision making between Idealab IT staff from all offices to define network and security conventions, managed the office rollout network/telecommunications task list and communicated directly with contractors.

Performed all aspects of systems administration on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris systems as well as network management and troubleshooting tasks.

Both as a senior technical staff member and as a manager, mentored junior employees, helping them complete projects and learn new technologies.

Senior Computing Analyst/Manager of Operations
May, 1989 - January, 2000
Information Technology Services, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California

During eleven years employment at Caltech worked on a variety of projects using a wide array of technologies. Job duties took me in several different directions–usually all at once.

Computer Network Management In the early 1990's helped convert the campus from multiple class C networks to a subnetted class B network. Subsequently responsible for equipment configuration and end user coordination when we expanded the network and converted bridged networks to multiple routed IP/IPX/Appletalk subnets.

Was primary technical contact for the campus wide area network and performed all router hardware and firmware upgrades, deployed BGP with our several neighbors, and was responsible for resolving problems with external vendors such as Los Nettos, CERFnet, ESNET and CENIC.

Designed the routing topology and configured and installed much of the Cisco switching and routing equipment deployed in the two-year "CITnet2000" campus re-wiring project. As part of this deployment, converted the campus network IGP from RIP to OSPF.

Systems Administration Responsible for managing servers running services including email, interactive logins, DNS and Usenet news. Performed systems administration on Solaris, SunOS, BSD Unix and VAX/VMS systems.

Other specific projects include:

• Deployment of second generation service to support PPP, ARA and ISDN dialup clients using Cisco AS5300 servers and multiple PRIs.

• Managed free-text database backend for library, migrating from VM/CMS installation to Unix and making extensive changes to custom interface written in proprietary BRS MNS menu language.

• Wrote various system tools in Perl, shell and awk: voluntary quota management alert scripts, SNMP statistics gathering tools, an early "email to news" gateway program.

Technical support – Provided last tier support to various divisional systems administrators. Exercised my debugging skills into muscular beauty on a variety of different operating system, application and networking problems–regularly diving into problems involving unfamiliar platforms or programming languages.

Knowledge transfer and training were always an important part of the job. Wrote a number of operational documents, short answer documents for frequently asked questions and an introductory Unix guide.

Skills

Cisco IOS, Foundry router and switch configuration
Cisco DWDM optical configuration and debugging (ONS 15454, 15808 and 15540 platforms)
Recent programming experience in Perl, SQL with mysql, PostgreSQL and Oracle
Unix systems administration and security (Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, Solaris)
Instructional and technical writing
Debugging, troubleshooting and plain old figuring stuff out