Curriculum Vitae of Alex Bennée
[Personal Details]
[Summary]
[Skills]
[Recent Employment]
[Education]
[FLOSS][Contact]
| Name: Alexis James Bennée |
Locations: Manchester, Cambridge, London |
|
| Nationality: British |
Availability:Immediate | |
I am an experienced software engineer with 14 years of industry experience.
Although primarily a system software engineer with extensive embedded
experience I have written
applications from GUI databases to web systems.
I have had both management and practitioner experience of several full product life-cycles.
I consider myself a pragmatic open source advocate and I
contribute
to several open source projects.
In recent years most of my development work has centred around Linux
and other Unixes.
I have a keen interest in computer and network security including
practical experience in securing servers and writing fire-walls.
I have an excellent understanding of a range of telecommunication and network protocols.
I have written code in several programming languages including:
- C/C++
- Assembler (6809,68k,PPC,x86/x86-64,SuperH,SPARC)
- Perl
- Emacs Lisp
- SDL
I have experience with a number of telecommunication and
data-communication protocols including:
- TCP/IP and upper layer services (e.g. SNMP, SMTP)
- ATM including aspects such as AALs (1/2/5), encapsulation (CIP,
PPPoA) and management (OAM)
- ISDN mainly layer 1 and 2 (including V5.1)
I use GNU/Linux systems for daily computing although I have experience using several other Operating Systems including:
- GNU/Linux (including Gentoo, RedHat, SuSE and Debian distributions)
- Other Unix variants (Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, *BSD)
- Various RTOSes (Linux, pSOS ,vxWorks, bespoke in house OS’s)
I have had a lot of experience with various development tools including: - GNU Tool-chain (gcc,gdb,make,autoconf etc.)
- Version control tools (GIT, CVS, PVCS, Clearcase)
- Embedded Tools (cross-compilers, ICE's, scopes, logic analysers)
I also have good motivational and leadership skills as well as
job and time management skills. I also consider myself to have
excellent Internet research skills.
January 2005 to Current
Lead Software Engineer
I was the Product Lead for the development of a SPARC/Solaris to x86/Solaris dynamic binary translator.
I prevously worked on the development of the SPARC/Solaris to x86_64/Linux translator.
Some of the work I have been involved with includes:
- Technical planning and leadership for the products I am responsible for
- Development of new features including leading the work on Precise Exceptions for our SPARC subject translators
- Representing the company at various technical conferences, occasionally delivering presentations
- Code baseline duties including integration, testing and QA activities while rolling project baselines
- Leveraging my extensive experience to help fellow engineers solve problems
September 2002 to January 2005
Senior Code Hacker
I worked as the principle Software Engineer of a venture capital backed startup developing next generation Digital Video Recorders for the security market. I was responsible for the software architecture as well as a large portion of the in house code base.
The product is an
embedded Linux system which took advantage of open source software to provide non-DVR functionality.
Braddahead completed a successful exit in July when it was bought by Baxall Ltd.
- Software system design and architecture (in close co-operation with the hardware team)
- Writing boot code to bring up hardware and the Linux Kernel
- Writing kernel drivers for the framebuffer, IDE, and DMA hardware
- Modifying existing drivers to fix portability issues with networking, SCSI and USB subsystems
- Writing user space drivers for the custom DVR hardware including frame capture, display and compression
Select projects: [Hide Team Leader]
January 1999 to September 2002
Software Team Leader - Line Systems Development
While I was a team leader I led a variety of embedded line card
projects.
I was involved in a large number of process improvement activities
as well as contributing my engineer expertise. I have been responsible
for teams of up to 8 engineers.
- Project planning and management for both green field and support work
- Preparation of estimates and risk assessments for business review
- Experienced in project maintenance, including prioritising and allocating work
- I have experience liaising with groups such as System Design,
project management as well as customers.
- Implemented several automated systems to improve departmental
processes (for example using Mantis to track bugs)
- Maintained a number of departmental Linux machines which
where used for a variety of activities (for example web portal, version control,
and networking tools)
December 1997 to January 1999
Software Engineer - System X Line Card Development
I started in the department supporting the existing Basic Rate ISDN
line cards at the tail of the "Home Highway" development and went on
to work on further line controller developments.
- Received an Individual Contribution award for my work fixing
several high profile field problems
- Implemented several modules of the HDSL Line Card
- Was the lead integrator of the Line Unit which included
responsibility for the boot code and OS
November 1994 to December 1997
Software Engineer - Video Game Development
I was working in a department that produced Video Gaming software for
various Casinos and other high stakes markets. My work included:
- Statistical analysis and simulation of game
logic
- Implementation and testing of several games from concept to
release
- Preparation of materials for gaming board approvals
July 1994 to November 1994
Software Engineer
I joined the Technology Partnership on a temporary contract after
graduating from Manchester. I was taken on to develop an
experimental teaching aid for the deaf. During my time there I became
involved in a variety of other projects.
- Wrote a real-time "voice to light" program
- An print image preprocessor (CMYK colour separation)
- Driver for a real-time multi channel i/o card controlling the printer
test rig
- A preliminary study of networking options to upgrade the
LAN
University of Manchester - BSc. in Chemistry
My final year project was a computer based analysis of Transfer
RNA. The main idea was to see if the stability of DNA-like molecules
was due to more than the already known hydrogen bonds in the system.
- Worked with chemical visualisation tools on an SGI Indy
- Worked with X-Ray crystallography data from large scientific databases
- Wrote a C program that efficiently processed and analysed
crystallography data to provide a list of possible candidate
hydrogen bonds
I have been a pragmatic Open Source advocate for many years. The following is a selection of some of the projects I have been involved with. Full details about other projects I have been involved with can be found on my homepage or looking at the relevant mailing lists.
Customise projects: [Hide STonX Emulator][Hide GTK-Gnutella][Hide Speedtouch Drivers][Hide Domain]
STonX
STonX is an Atari ST emulator for X windows based systems.
During my formative years I wrote a lot of code on the ST.
Out of nostalgic curiosity I got involved with the project hosted on Sourceforge.
This included:
- Re-implemented the broken "monitor" functionality
- Cleaned up and enhanced the autoconf based build process
- Created RPM packages for ease of installation
- Fixed several bugs with the BIOS emulation
- Been the release engineer for several versions
Speedtouch USB Driver
The first broadband connection through BT used an Alcatel Speedtouch USB ADSL modem.
After getting tired of maintaining a Windows machine just to provide a gateway I joined an existing development team who were building on Benoit Papillault's userspace driver.Some of the work included:
- Bug fixes to the driver code
- Documentation fixes and clarifications
- Packaging work, especially getting clean LSB compliant RPMs
- Release work
GTK-Gnutella
GTK-Gnutella is a server/client that implements the Gnutella peer to peer information exchange protocols.I became interested in the project due to it's robust decentralised design as well as curiosity about it's emergent behaviour.Some of the things I've been involved with include:
- Implementation of search queueing. This is important to prevent the server flooding the network with queries as each client connects.
- Bitzi query integration. The Bitzi database is a meta database which stores information about files.
- General bug triage and fixing
Home Domain
My own domain is hosted by my modest home network linked to the Internet
through my domestic broadband connection. This has resulted in several
mini-projects including:
- Implemented a Linux based iptables router/firewall with port forwarding
- Handling a static domain with the vagaries of dynamic IP allocation by my ISP
- Hosting a number of web-based tools including Wikis, blogs and this CV
- Hosting email and mailing lists for a number of my friends
Postal mail address on request
Click here for a printable version.