The Brief Bio

Education:

Work History:

I graduated from HMC with a general engineering degree and started work at Hughes as a systems engineer. I worked on an Army/Marine communication and location system (EPLRS/PLRS) and its various R&D projects. I slowly migrated into the software side of things and eventually ended up on loan to the software department coding in Ada and C.

In early 1995 the Fullerton portion of Hughes was relocated to El Segundo (for financial reasons). Rather than commute for an extra 2 hours a day I did an in-company transfer to become one of the 1000 people who stayed in Fullerton. Unfortunately the project I transferred to had some major management problems. Fortunately I received a job offer from Gencorp Aerojet (4 day work weeks and a 10 minute commute) in October of 95. So I went there.

I started at Aerojet writing Ada for a prototype CPU card from Honeywell. Unfortunately the CPU card didn't support interrupts and had some other problems - so I was unable to use tasks and had to use a background loop.

I migrated to the SBIRS proposal effort (initially working on the Software Development Plan - keeping it from being too unrealistic). After the program was won (vaporware always looking better than real hardware) I stepped into the vacant position of builder/configuration manager. This involved teaching myself ClearCase (the CM tool that had been decided on) and moving the existing RCS baseline to ClearCase control. I also had to design an "Intro to ClearCase" class and answer the questions of the coders using it. I then transitioned the build portion of my job to a new hire and tried to fully document the coding process on our project.

In January of 2000 Heather took a job with Idealab! - an internet incubator. After visiting here there (in the Internet bubble months of 2000 :) I was struck with job envy and got a job at one of the Idealab! incubatee's (Jackpot.com) as a software engineer. Since then the internet bubble economy has started to deflate - but we haven't folded yet.

Jackpot has become the VendareGroup and I have transitioned to the role of the data/stats guy. I run SQL queries for both analysis and data sales operations. I am also responsible for creating web pages to display various site statistics.

Software Engineering

I am also a believer in adequate documentation of code and processes. One of the things I was doing at Aerojet is making sure that the man pages and help documentation adequately explain the software we are delivering. I was also involved in an effort to make the software itself easier to use and deliver.