[Personal Details] [Summary] [Skills] [Recent Employment] [Education] [FLOSS][Contact]

Personal Details

Summary

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.

Technical Skill Summary

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)

• 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)

• GNU Tool-chain (gcc,gdb,make,autoconf etc.)
• Version control tools (GIT, CVS, PVCS, Clearcase)
• Embedded Tools (cross-compilers, ICE's, scopes, logic analysers)

Recent Employment

Transitive, Manchester

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

Braddahead (Now Baxall), St Helens

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

Marconi, Liverpool

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)

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

Barcrest Ltd, Ashton-under-Lyne

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

The Technology Partnership, Cambridge

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

Education

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

FLOSS Experience

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

Contact Details

• Email : alex@bennee.com (preferred)
• Homepage : www.bennee.com/~alex/
• Mobile : +44 (0) 793 2733275