Highlights of Skills and Knowledge

• Technical leadership of multiple projects, including improvement of engineering practices and quality.
• Management of engineering teams, working with several multi-discipline groups simultaneously, and starting and managing a small business.
• Engineering leadership experience with all phases of online product development: early concept, pre-production, production, internal testing, public testing, deployment, production support, live product enhancement, new markets and business models, expansions and sequels, etc.
• Architecture and implementation of high availability, high performance software on a variety of platforms.
• Profiling, modeling, and optimizing server performance, and measuring and reporting results of improvements.
• Experience with TCP/IP (sockets) and UDP, distributed systems, and multi threaded programming (POSIX pthreads and Win32).
• Extensive programming experience in C++ and C.
• Development using the C++ Standard Template Library, templates, RTTI, and ACE.
• Experience with debugging tools including Valgrind, Insure++, Purify, dmalloc, and others.
• Development and system administration experience with Unix systems including Linux, Solaris, and Irix.
• Experience with XML, HTML, CSS, CGI, and Apache web server installation, setup, and maintenance.
• Multi-platform Unix development with GNU tool chain including GCC. Microsoft Windows programming with Visual C++ and MFC.
• Experience with Java, Python, PHP, Perl, Pascal, BASIC, MS Visual Basic, COBOL, and Intel x86 assembly language.

Products Shipped

• Ultima Online, Klingon Academy, CJK Update, UO: The Second Age, UO: Third Dawn, UO: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge, UO: Age of Shadows, UO: Seventh Anniversary Edition, UO: Samurai Empire, UO: Mondain's Legacy, UO: The 8th Age, UO: Kingdom Reborn.

Experience

• Senior Software Engineer, BioWare studio of Electronic Arts, 1/2008 to present
  
  • Server software development on Star Wars: The Old Republic.
  
  
• Technical Director, EA Mythic studio of Electronic Arts, 9/2007 to 1/2008
  
  • Technical oversight of Ultima Online/Dark Age of Camelot group.
  • Designed and implemented character database improvements to allow large character data sets and prevent near-future critical downtime.
  • Designed a technical architecture to support a significant new market.
  • Evaluated security, patching, and other systems of the product and created improvement recommendations for engineering teams and management.
  • Managed source control system and tools.
  • Part of team which coordinated project move from California to Fairfax, VA, including movement of development hardware and planning for movement of critical backend systems.
  
  
• Senior Software Engineer, Electronic Arts, 5/2004 to 9/2007
  
  • Released UO: Seventh Anniversary Edition, UO: Samurai Empire, UO: Mondain's Legacy, and UO: The 8th Age, and UO: Kingdom Reborn.
    
  • Remote employee based in Austin, TX, working with teams in Redwood City, CA and Fairfax, VA.
  • Technical design, review, and implementation on Ultima Online projects.
  • Researched, prototyped, and modeled new online game technology, including asset streaming systems and networking systems.
  • Profiled and modeled server performance, predicting maximum user loads and CPU usage growth.  Modeled growth of subsystem performance and growth. Integrated lightweight profiling system.
  • Led optimization of server code, coordinating several engineers optimizing different systems.  Personally optimized server CPU usage by ~25% during high player loads.  Measured improvement and recommended future work.  Optimization contributed significantly to smooth launch of expansion product.
  • Modeled server CPU and memory usage for possible future products with different performance characteristics, and other situations.
  • Implemented expansion promotional item framework, sixth character slot support, and additional game features.
  • Restructured server runtime directory layout to enable deployment via software configuration management tool.  Improved organization and setup of server software to increase management efficiency. Involved large code changes throughout server software.
  • Fixed critical, difficult to find issues such as a ship object duplication exploit, back end data warehouse process instability, and network library error checking.  Provided Operations with information, investigation, and production issue resolution 24/7.
  • Managed source control system and tools.
  
  
• Director of Technology, Origin Systems studio of Electronic Arts, 6/2001 to 5/2004
• Released UO: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge and UO: Age of Shadows.
• Received Origin MVP (most valuable player) company award for 2001.
• Responsible for technical strategy and architecture of studio projects, including Ultima Online and UXO.
• Worked closely with engineering and management of UO Live, UO Expansion, UXO, and QA Engineering teams, with dotted line reporting of all engineering leads.
• Led architecture and technical design of Ultima X: Odyssey, a massively multi player online game.
• Led the technical requirements, architecture, and design of new projects.  Led evaluation of technologies to use in new and existing products.
• Worked with team leads to plan future tasks.  Investigated and recommended improvements and necessary changes, and identified future risks. Created engineering project schedules with team leads.
• Conducted engineer interviews and made hiring recommendations.
• Worked with Producers and multi-discipline team leads of multiple projects, providing technical evaluation, risk identification, and advice.
• Interfaced with Technical Directors, engineers, and CTOs throughout Electronic Arts to provide and gather information, and evaluate technology for reuse.
• Led the creation of engineering/coding standards.  Worked with multiple teams of engineers for input and feedback.
• Led creation of software development process.  Documented and formalized existing processes and worked with team leads to improve processes.
• Implemented code review process and led code review sessions to improve engineering quality.
• Created a technical library for reference and educational use by engineers.  Organized training in software engineering for programmers.  Trained customers in requirements creation.
• Dramatically increased uptime and stability of the Ultima Online service with a variety of improvements, refactoring, analysis, debugging, engineering process improvements, and engineering quality improvements.  Increased performance of the service with a variety of optimizations.
• Analyzed and diagnosed kernel panic traps and core files.  Documented and taught system administrators.
• Managed multiple source control systems (CVS and Perforce) and tools.
  
 
• Senior Software Engineer, Origin Systems studio of Electronic Arts, Ultima Online, 8/2000 to 6/2001
• Released UO: Third Dawn.
• Redesigned and implemented new distributed, parallel world state save and load system, reducing state save times from 1-2 hours to 5-15 minutes and making startup 2-5 times faster.
• Optimized compilation of proprietary scripting language, making script compilation six times faster. Created standalone script compiler which increased designer efficiency.
• Fully ported distributed server software to Linux. Involved researching kernel source code.
• Added network metrics tools to client, allowing dynamic monitoring of bandwidth usage and packet statistics.
• Created dynamic gameplay update range, allowing players with lower quality connections to play on more equal footing by reducing their update range.
• Automated setup of server machines by creating setup scripts and data images.
• Designed and implemented a server-side movement limiting system that works with the existing protocol lacking time synchronization.
• Designed and implemented internationalization assistance program to automatically replace static strings with string ids and new function calls, and create string files for localization.
• Designed and implemented inactive and canceled character deletion.
• Troubleshooted and fixed hardware problems, such as finding and removing incorrect memory type, configuring RAID arrays, etc.
• Discovered and fixed many server crashes and potential crashes and exploits, thus increasing service uptime.
• Designed and implemented various other optimizations and improvements.
• Independent contractor from 8/2000 to 1/2001.
  
 
• Principal Software Engineer, President, Wombat Games, Inc., 9/1998 to 8/2000
• Released Klingon Academy.
• Game design, technical design, and programming on Dark Zion, a massively multi player online role playing game.
• Provided Origin Systems, Inc. and Ultima Online: The Second Age with general programming, networking, performance, patching, bug fixing, systems programming, documentation, training, and deployment services, and with 24 hour on call engineering support.
• Developed multi player support in Klingon Academy for Interplay Productions.
• Extensive use of C, C++, templates, STL, RTTI, Python, and Bourne shell with development under Linux and Windows.
• Implemented and used the R+-Tree and OBB-Tree (Oriented Bounding Box Tree) spatial data structures.
• Configured Apache web server with virtual servers, IP aliasing, sendmail, SSH, and Samba.
• Started business with partners, managed business of 5 employees, including payroll, taxes, hiring, personnel, dismissal, budgeting, scheduling, contract negotiations, proposals, press releases, and corporate meetings.
  
 
• Senior Software Engineer, Origin Systems studio of Electronic Arts, 12/1997 to 8/1998
• Released Ultima Online: The Second Age.
• Lead Programmer, Ultima Online: The Second Age, the first expansion of Ultima Online, and UO Live, the continuing maintenance and improvement of the UO service.
• Managed programmers, defined requirements, developed specifications, created task lists, scheduling, reported progress. Created project schedule.
• Initiated effort to replace Sun servers with Intel based servers (which offered the same performance and reliability for almost 1/10th the cost), resulting in savings of over $1 million per year in hardware leasing costs.
• Designed or helped design automatic translation support, internationalization, chat system GUI.
• Responsible for task assignments, time estimation, schedule tracking, bug assignments, performance reviews, reviewing resumes, coordinating interviews, technology evaluation, improving software engineering practices.
  
  
• Senior Software Engineer, Origin Systems, studio of Electronic Arts, 11/1996 to 12/1997
• Released Ultima Online, the award winning massively multiplayer online game.
• Programmer, Ultima Online, an award winning massively multi player online role playing game supporting tens of thousands of simultaneous players.
• Designed and implemented auto patching system (client and server), interprocess script communication system, multiobj system, boats, player housing, global hint system, game master tools, object decay, communication crystals, magic item creation system. Worked on most systems in the game.
• Extensive use of C++, templates, STL, TCP/IP (sockets), Win32, MFC, Win32 threads and POSIX pthreads with development under Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
• Lead Programmer from 1/1998. Maintained task lists, reported progress, managed small team of engineers.
• On call 24/7. Fixed many critical problems whenever they occurred.
• Made numerous CPU and memory optimizations which greatly improved performance of game servers. Improved stability of service.
  
 
• Additional Experience and Projects available

Activities

• Speaker, CESA Developers Conference (CEDEC) 2008 (Tokyo, Japan). "Recent Trends in U.S. Game Development Processes"
• Speaker and Co-Chair, NPSOT-NPAT 2007 Joint Symposium: Texas Prairies: Celebrate a Natural Treasure. "We Can Make A Difference"
• Speaker/Panelist, Austin Game Development Conference 2007. "Taming Online Scaling Issues"
• Speaker, Univeristy of Central Florida, Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, 2006. "Engineering Online Games"
• Speaker, Austin Game Conference 2004. "Best Practices in Online Game Development"
• Program Committee, NetGames Conference (ACM SIGCOMM) 2004.
• Program Committee, ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE) 2004
• Speaker, Austin Game Conference 2003. "Using Software Engineering Practices in Game Development"

Education

• Youngstown State University
• Graduated Summa Cum Laude with an Honors Bachelor of Science degree, with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics, March 1996.
• First graduate of the University Scholars Program, which included a full tuition and room/board scholarship.
• Won the 1994 Annual Calculus Competition sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and Pi Mu Epsilon.
• Kent State University
• Attended KSU from 1991 to 1993 with a GPA of 4.00 while still attending high school.
• Beaver Local High School
• Graduated as Valedictorian in May of 1993.

Volunteer Work

• Treasurer and Board Member, Native Prairies Association of Texas (a land trust), 1/2005 to present
• Co-chair of conservation conference which attracted ~400 attendees from throughout Texas.
• Performed fundraising and grant writing resulting in over $750,000 for the organization's programs.
• Managed multi-region tallgrass prairie county survey project involving multiple contractors around the state.
• Responsible for financial accounts, planning, budgeting, and reports.  Paid bills and handled reimbursements.
• Prepared and presented quarterly financial reports and annual budget at board meetings and annual meeting.
• Prepared and filed Form 990 and related IRS reporting forms.
• Created and moderated email announcement list. Redesigned web site with appealing prairie images of native prairie flowers, grasses, and wildlife.
  
  
• Webmaster, Austin Chapter and Williamson County Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas, 12/2000 to present.
• Designed and maintained chapter websites.
• Added and updated web pages with monthly meeting, project, and other useful information.  Created and moderated email announcement list.
  

• Secretary, Austin Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas, 2/2005 to 1/2007.
• Recorded minutes of chapter meetings. Maintained chapter records.
  

References

• References available upon request.