Career

I currently work as the Global Field Application Engineer Team Leader for MontaVista. MontaVista is the leading vendor of Linux based platform software target towards people designing products for consumer, mobile, networking, and embedded applications.

I live day-to-day doing my part to help my customers and colleagues apply Linux and other Open Source technology to address demanding applications and products. This goes far beyond just technical nuts-and-bolts. I'm frequently involved in licensing, quality assurance, networking, security, business, product management, pricing, and support issues for internal and external projects.

I've also started a more formal collaboration with our product management group at MontaVista. We've got some exciting concepts in-flight and the chance to work with our marketing team to guide this effort was an opportunity that I am pleased to have accepted.

I met MontaVista as a customer and was hired in as a Field Application Engineer. Common names for this role at other companies include Sales Engineer, Systems Engineer, or Technical Sales.

I've found great satisfaction working at the intersection between software technology and business. There are numerous challenges and the variety is stimulating.

A recent article I read (reference forthcoming) said that a software starup needs two kinds of people:

  • People who write code.
  • People who go get users.

Of the two I aspire to be the latter. I may, from time to time, do some of the former but that's not my calling.

I graduated from The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) with a degree in Computer Engineering.

Professional Interests

Professional Interests

  • All aspects of Linux and the Open Source world.
  • Embedded systems.
  • Business implications of working with and utilizing Free or Open Source software distributed under the BSD, GPL, LGPL, and other licenses.
  • The OSDL Carrier Grade Linux specification.
  • Technical Sales: there are numerous challenges and lessons to be learned from selling technical products to technical consumers. Doing so efficiently, predictably, and ethically has been a big part of my job the last 5 years.
  • I've been spending a chunk of my time developing applications using Amazon's Web Services APIs: EC2, S3, SQS. It is simply amazing how quickly you can scale an application if you have the right architecture. EC2 made some applications that were previously infeasible quite affordable.
  • Managing all of those deployed EC2 instances requires something more advanced then just a script. I've been working with Puppet to tackle the job. Some initial progress.
  • I've also been working with Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework quite a lot lately. It was easy to pick up after working with Perl for so long.

Recent Projects

I just wrapped up the first deployment of the MontaVista TestDrive system. TestDrive is a entirely web-based way to evaluate MontaVista products. It eliminates the download/install/configure cycle that customers used to go through just to try MontaVista. The technology is using some of the newest web services products out on the market and leverages platform simulation technology from Virtutech.

My role was product management and  the implementation effort.

TestDrive was just awarded eg3.com Editor's Choice for Best New Product, 2007. One of 7 selected from over 4,000 new product announcements.

Technologies I'm Dabbling with

The fun part of my job is I get to work with a wide variety of software systems and technologies. Some areas I've been shoved into recently:

  • CIM/WBEM
  • Common Criteria certification, SELinux, SELinux reference policies
  • NTP, Leap second accounting
  • Rules based expert systems like Jess.

Interests I'm Expanding into or Aspiring to

  • Quality Assurance architectures for complex and evolving software systems. Linux and Open Source software is frequently assumed to be of uniformly high quality in all applications. My experiences have taught me that this is freqently not the case. More thoughts on this later.
  • Wiki based community and knowledge-base systems. I have great respect for the complexity of communities such as Wikipedia. I'm a personal user and administrator of an instance of the TWiki system. There are significant social and technical challenges to encouraging information sharing within a corporate community.
  • I've been putting time into learning about Ontologies, Ontology engineering, and related technologies.
  • Security engineering... what a fascinating area to live your life in.

Events 

I travel quite a bit for business but here is a sampling of some of my more public events. 

  • South Florida Embedded Design Group, August, 2001 
  • Radisys Technical Seminar, September 2002 
  • Enterprise Linux Forum Conference & Expo - Oct 22-23, 2003
  • Numerous Real Time and Embedded Computing Conferences
  • GSPx conference panel, San Jose, CA, September 2004
  • Lucent Software Symposium, Naperville, IL, October 2005
  • Florida Programmable Logic User's Group, Clearwater, FL, October 2006
  • Samsung Software Center Symposium, Seoul, South Korea, January 2007
  • Freescale NCSG World Wide FAE Conference, Dallas, TX, July 2007
  • Freescale Technology Forum 2008: "Save Valuable Battery Life with Linux Power Management"

Item's I've Read Worth Reading Again

Location and Contact

I live and work from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia (USA).

You can contact me at:

I'll reply with a real email address after I figure out who you are.