Dynamic, creative, hands-on technology leader with a deep & current technical skill set, and a passion for building great software.
Husband of a beautiful wife • Father of three • Avid runner & skier
Java Virtual Threads - pitfalls to look out for!
My early research into Java Virtual Threads unearths some immediate and concerning but wholly fixable problems.
OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code grant type - fully visualized
My full sequence diagram for three-legged OAuth with explanations and examples, born out of frustration with the sometimes incomplete versions floating around the web.
A career that's gone from desktop applications to scalable event-driven microservices (and everything in between) has left me uniquely qualified to make the 'big picture' decisions your business requires.
My vast collection of languages, tools, libraries, APIs, methodologies, & architectures, plus high bandwidth uptake of new ones, means I'll always be able to "dive into the code" if necessary.
My deep understanding of the forces shaping the computer industry protects your business from myopic technology decisions e.g. picking the right cloud is about a lot more than price.
Software development isn't just a job for me. It's a joy and a lifelong passion. A passion which I'll bring to your business each and every day.
Small group or large organization, I bring a hands-on, pragmatic, and decisive leadership style. My goal is to inspire everyone to be great by showing them how every day.
I'm a polished presenter to any size group. Having someone with deep technical understanding who can also deliver a sale pitch can help a business close deals & reach new customers.
The takeaway here is not the individual items below but how broad, deep and current they are, making my uptake of new concepts, languages, or technologies fast and thorough. The list does not include items I've used only in passing like Apache Spark, Google AppEngine, AWS S3, etc. and does not include any number of 'legacy' (but sometimes useful) skills like x86 assembler.
Designing a product from the ground up, leading a team taking an existing product to the next level, selling a product at the CxO level, personally developing new, highly complex technologies, I've done it all and can do it all.
2020-2023 Researched, designed, and orchestrated the move of Relativity's monolithic, tenant-specific, VM-hosted workloads into Azure-based Kubernetes clusters with minimal code changes. Doing so required significant consensus building across the organization and breaking existing code hosting paradigms both architecturally and culturally. This move represented a multimillion-dollar reduction in COGS for Relativity's flagship SaaS product.
2018-2019 Successfully championed Kubernetes to the C-suite over several Azure-specific options. Oversaw and coordinated the development and global roll out of the initial clusters and workloads. After much consensus building and under significant pressure from leadership, the first feature driven by the new Kubernetes clusters was available to beta customers in only 7 months.
2022 Clarified the benefits of Apache Spark to the organization through a self-directed R&D effort comparing its performance on a large Avro-based data set versus a time-boxed, hand-coded, C# implementation.
2018 Revitalized a software group struggling from a lack of technological leadership and negative management. Streamlined the existing 'process heavy' culture while coaching and mentoring the teams as we re-architected a complex text ingestion pipeline at the core of Relativity's search functionality. The top results were significantly improved team satisfaction scores and a 3X performance increase in search indexing speed.
2017 Solved critical issues causing significant negative customer feedback on the newly released Relativity One SaaS product. Leveraged front-end coding skills to improve the average navigation time between documents, the most common user workflow in Relativity, from several seconds to well under half a second and in many cases into the 10s of milliseconds range.
2017 Orchestrated the transition of the Outside In team and 5M+ lines of source code from Oracle to Relativity. Directed the development of an entirely new CI pipeline that included massive, automated, nightly regression testing, resulting in a stable, independently deliverable library free of the existing Relativity release cycle. This allowed the team to quickly iterate on many new features critical to Relativity's customers and sales process, far outpacing anything that Oracle could deliver to Relativity’s competitors who almost all use this same technology.
Actual title was VP, Software Development due to the Bitform acquisition but acted largely as an IC Principal Architect.
Led a team developing a scalable, cloud-ready web service and associated REST API for high throughput document transformation.
Embraced Agile methodologies for continued development of Clean Content while moving it into a new security space.
Developed multi-platform inter-process communication methodology using Google Protocol Buffers with stdio as the transport. Using the universally available stdio infrastructure as a substrate allowed for zero platform specific code on the Java side and almost none on the C/C++ side. Prototyped using shared memory as an alternative transport, achieving message passing times of a few microseconds.
For my own interest, developed an Android app that displays Twitter streams to Google Chromecast enabled devices. This project included using Google AppEngine as the cloud back end, interacting with the Twitter REST API through OAuth, and developing a smooth, robust UX using HTML5/JavaScript in the extremely resource constrained Chromecast environment.
As the co-founder of a startup, developed declarative architecture for processing of complex binary data formats using XML Schema as a basis. Extended XML Schema to include binary data types, repositioning at the attribute level, reference following, tokenization, extended conditionals, expression evaluation, sub-stream generation and custom referencing schemes. Developed code generation system against resulting schema that produced robust, scalable, efficient, high performance, Java-based transformations of the world's most complex document formats including the Microsoft Office formats and Adobe PDF.
The resulting product, Clean Content, provides deep content inspection and sanitization of Office and PDF documents. It's found significant traction in the US intelligence community and our 'five eyes' allies.
Bitform sold to Stellent/Oracle
Provided technology vision for the Outside In technologies including directing movement to XML based output (XML Export – 2001)
Significant product/corporate evangelization efforts including membership on various relevant standards committees (see below)
Enhanced sales cycle by providing CXO level technical presentation and discussion capabilities resulting in numerous > $1M deals
Spearheaded and directed development of Outside In® versions for the Internet (HTML Export - 1995) and for wireless carriers and mobile platforms (Wireless Export - 1999).
Developed core architecture for the Outside In set of technologies including early focus on the Windows platform.
The Oracle Product Architecture Community (OPAC) aims to facilitate cross-company technical collaboration and knowledge sharing. OPAC represents the top 1% of Oracle's engineering talent.
This event is put on by the U.S. DoD's Unified Cross Domain Services Management Office. I presented Sanitization Considerations for Font-Based Malware to several hundred members of the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other vendors of cross-domain solutions.
This event is put on by the U.S. DoD's Unified Cross Domain Services Management Office. I presented Zero Day Malware Threat Removal using Document Sanitization to several hundred members of the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other vendors of cross-domain solutions.
Presented Your Documents Are Leaking - An Introduction to Content Cleansing to roughly 1000 attendees.
Major contributor to Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) technical committee during the initial development of the 1.0 specification. This is the format used by OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
Contributed XML expertise to this group laying the foundation for XML processing in Java.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book...
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book...
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book...
Phil is a brilliant and passionate engineer who cares deeply about the experience of both customers and developers he works with. As a technical leader, he does a great job walking the line between standardization and freedom of innovation which enables the developers he works with to thrive. He is willing and able to jump from high level work with executives to deep technical proof of concepts with other principal engineers to on the ground development with engineers without missing a beat.
Phil is a world-class developer, excellent presenter and a great multitasker. I've had the opportunity to work with Phil at SCC, Inso Corporation, Stellent and Bitform, and he's always made himself available to support the sales effort while producing outstanding products with high barriers to entry. I recommend Phil without hesitation to any organization that appreciates an exceptional, hands-on technologist.
I have worked with Phil in every size software organization ranging from startup to midsize to Oracle. He excelled in every role along the way. His software development skills are phenomenal and his range of industry technical depth is unmatched. He will deliver whether you need a brand new product designed from scratch or an existing technology scaled to the cloud. I could go on and on about his great presentation skills to large prospects, market insights, team leadership, personal drive, and much more. I highly recommend Phil for the role of software executive and architect.
Phil is an incredibly capable, and deeply experienced in strategic and tactical engineering. I was particularly impressed by is focus on identifying implementations that balanced incredibly complex technical requirements with the real world needs of the business and its customers. In the year we worked together I learned a great deal from from him. Specifically, he provided excellent advice on effectively communicating engineering solutions to leadership and refining engineering focused presentations.
I'd put a contact form here but email is simpler
