United States Naval Academy

Director, Technology Operations and Resilience at DICK'S Sporting Goods

Pipersville, Pennsylvania

Establishing the Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering team and practice at Comcast. Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) brings Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) concepts and benefits to cloud teams and application teams adopting cloud technology. Responsible for setting CRE team vision, team membership, and defining CRE success across all public and private cloud platforms, resulting in more reliable and cost-efficient cloud-native applications.

Comcast

Director, Cloud Customer Reliability Engineering

Leading the teams responsible for all aspects of the Comcast OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and OpenShift Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) private clouds. OpenStack provides a VM-based cloud solution while OpenShift provides a multi-tenant Kubernetes-based solution. Both technologies are key parts to the cloud platform portfolio that support faster delivery of applications.Responsibilities include availability, performance, monitoring, deployments, and security of the cloud. Sets team staffing and direction to insure technology deliveries provide maximum business value.Outreach efforts include support for application owners' progress towards more effective use of cloud technologies in obtaining business results.

Director - Comcast Private Cloud

Leading the Comcast Elastic Cloud Site Reliability Engineering (CEC SRE Ops) team. This team provides operational support across the large-scale OpenStack private cloud offering within Comcast. Key tenets are increased operational awareness for our customers, scaling through automation, and constant improvement against key business metrics.Led the X1 Operations Core Services team to improve the pace of delivery of business value. Primary areas of activity included service availability of key Linux services (DNS, LDAP, NTP, MTA, DHCP), expanding the team's infrastructure-as-code capabilities, and working with Development teams to deliver customer-facing capability faster.Managing the large-scale deployment of two OpenStack regions to support the rapidly-growing X1 customer base. Certified OpenStack professional.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Team Manager

Responsible for leadership of teams supporting rapid software delivery. Primary areas of activity include test automation and build/deployment activities.Leading the effort to build the first consumer-facing private cloud within Barclays. This effort introduces the technologies of OpenStack and Chef to a highly-regulated, security-conscious business. Improvements are being driven across software development, testing, operations, compliance, audit, and security business functions.Actively leading change and modernization to promote faster delivery of business value by adopting state-of-the-art industry strategies of DevOps and Continuous Delivery.Responsible for defining the group mission within the context of larger company goals, creating the organizational structure to pursue the group mission, and insure the group is staffed for success, including leadership positions for each of the teams.

BarclaycardUS

DevOps Group Manager

As a direct report to the CTO, responsible for overall success of Sefaira software SaaS products and software applications used within Sefaira consulting engagements.Provides the CEO, CTO, and executive team with concise reporting on current activities and recommendations on future direction of both technology and business efforts.Aids in prioritization of software development projects with Product Management, creates project team rosters, and provides oversight of ongoing projects.Guiding the maturation of internal software practices from a start-up, one-off approach towards a repeatable Agile Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC), supported by Continuous Integration practices and informed by business feedback from Marketing and Product Management.Defined the Production operational posture for SaaS offerings and aided in implementation. Responsible for recruiting and growing the Sefaira Development team to meet the needs of the business, including engaging contract resources as needed. This responsibility includes interviewing developers, QA personnel, and candidates for Enterprise Architect roles.

Sefaira

Director of Software Development

Provides overall leadership for internal software development team and integration with external vendors. As a direct report to the CIO, assists business stakeholders with prioritizing, planning, and oversight of major projects. Manages department budget and staffing. Monitors team performance in delivering projects and production support. Organizes team and evaluates team composition to meet business needs. Acts as liaison to Marketing, Finance, Operations, Project Management, and Quality Assurance departments and external vendors. Interacts with these business units in both a tactical manner for solution delivery and strategic planning to support long-term business goals. Promotes continual improvement in software practices and evaluation of new technologies to support the delivery of high-quality business products.Leading Technology direction from a collection of small-scale applications to an enterprise-class service-oriented architecture. Activities range from initiating basic Development building blocks such as source code control, high-fidelity testing, and release planning to long-range roadmap planning. Working with the Director of Information Technology to insure overall business goals for growth are supported by underlying systems.Driving organizational change to promote greater business focus by Development. Increased efficiency of Development team by creating review process of non-project activities, leading to project-oriented work to eliminate those activities and create tools used by non-Development teams.

Energy Plus

Manager of a team of software developers delivering enterprise-scale, public-facing, and partner- facing JEE-based solutions for BarclaycardUS. Performs lead architect role on selected projects.Interacts with partners’ technology teams, technology vendors, internal technology groups, release management, project management, quality assurance, business management, and business partner management to deliver needed business capability. Mentoring development team leads on engineering leadership.Responsible for improving software delivery process including schedule estimates, resource allocation, design and code reviews and software test strategy. Coaches developers and project managers on improving software quality and schedule accuracy. Currently leading effort to create an automation test suite to support testing of complex test scenarios involving customer interaction and web services.Performs performance reviews of managers on the team. Responsible for interviewing candidates for full-time and contractor software developer openings, vendor contractor rate negotiation, and performance feedback.Created in-house system documentation repository now used for partner integration, internal reference, and educating internal business customers.

Software Engineering Manager

As a part owner and company officer of startup company Dauntless, Inc. (subsequently acquired by Abraxas, Inc.), aided in defining business strategy, company organization and goals. Performed recruiting activities, interviewing and hiring candidates. Met with other business leaders to market offerings of Dauntless and pursue work in partnership with other companies.In role as software engineer, performed development, testing, deployment, and operational support of a JEE application incorporating Spring MVC, Hibernate, the JORAM JMS provider, and Oracle deployed to the Apache Tomcat application server. Application supported authoring of documents by internal workforce for global dissemination. Designed and developed web services client used within the application to perform user authorization against corporate authorization services. Client was generated using Apache Axis tools, tested with JUnit within the Eclipse IDE, and integrated with the application using Spring. Performed subsequent migration of corporate authorization data using JDBC, Spring, and Hibernate. Present design uses both local and corporate authorization data.Performed functional and performance testing using Rational Robot. Created flexible, modular test scripts within Robot to speed the creation of subsequent, larger test scripts.Developed and deployed a web-based JEE application to BEA's WebLogic application server. Application served as a read-only database application of customer data. The application employed software-layering concepts, separating presentation, logic, and database access. The open-source Struts framework was used with Java Server Pages (JSPs) for the presentation layer, custom business delegates for business logic, and a stateless session EJB acting as a container for Data Access Objects (DAOs) data access layer. The DAOs used standard JDBC classes and techniques to perform database queries with a Sybase RDBMS.

Abraxas, Inc.

VP, Maryland Operations and Manager/Software Engineer

Manager and Lead Developer on a seven-person team for a Web-based search and analysis tool supporting the internal workforce of a government customer. Application employs Struts, Tiles, Tomcat, Oracle, and RetrievalWare technologies. Designed and built an asynchronous federated search service incorporating disparate data sources. Responsible for product design, development team tasking and day-to-day development decisions.Manager and Lead Developer on a five-person team for a development team building a Web-based decision-support system for a government customer. Data was stored in an Oracle 8i database and accessed via a WebLogic 6.1 application server using Java Server Pages, Enterprise Java Beans, and custom Java classes deployed within a JEE-compliant application. Security was enforced through verification of X.509 certificates for the server and client and custom security Java classes. Responsible for design and implementation of server-side constructs to allow maximum availability, application robustness, and on-line updates of server-side data manipulation software. Reviewed database design to insure maintainability of data model and performance for end-user queries. Developed software to provide query results in HTML and XML formats. Integrated custom logging classes to WebLogic logging facility with the capability to log data to other storage facilities (RDBMS, etc.). Designed and implemented Web-based application administrator console to provide insight into customer interaction with application.

DATA, Inc.

Technical Manager/Software Engineer

Developed natural-language Web-based query-response system in C++/XML/XSLT. Aided in developing API for interaction with system database (MS SQL Server and Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere) using ODBC/JDBC. Responsible for application/database performance. Developed Java Native Interface (JNI) components to allow Java components to reuse C++ code.Database application developer for Web bid-based text advertising system. Responsible for writing stored procedures, database administrative tasks, and overall database performance. Architecture used MS SQL Server 7.0, JRun Java servlet engine, MS IIS 4.0, Windows NT 4.0, and MKS Toolkit (a Unix emulation environment). OS-level scripting implemented in Korn-shell scripts, application logic resided in servlets and stored procedures.

Ask Jeeves, Inc.

Database Administrator/Software Engineer

Lead software developer for a team that developed a custom financial tracking application for a federal government customer. Application employed a 3-tier architecture using a Sybase database server, PowerBuilder clients, and a Distributed PowerBuilder middle tier. Active in all phases of system development including object-oriented PowerBuilder development for the client and application server, Sybase architecture, stored procedures, performance optimization, and interaction with external systems. Prototyped a web-based interface integrating Netscape Enterprise Server 3.6, Sybase Adaptive Server 11.5, and a PowerBuilder application server. Assistant web server administrator for customer's enterprise-wide intranet. Responsible for maintenance, user support, and content guidance. Aided in starting the design and implementation of a cross-platform customer software object library.Created and implemented a Java-based Internet search engine supplement. Responsible for system architecture, database design, and application development. System development required knowledge of HTML, JDBC, multithreading issues, and object-oriented concepts. Combined strengths of Java (ease of multithreading and Internet awareness) with strengths of database systems (server- side high-performance processing of datasets). Constructed system for future features to include load balancing across multiple servers, database connection pooling, and object pooling.

Sybase/PowerBuilder Developer

Manager of six-person team responsible for engineering support to a federal government customer. Responsible for system architecture development, design and development of a single-point-of- access investigative research and analysis tool. The client/server application was developed using PowerBuilder 6.0, PowerDesigner, and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE). The system features a services-based object-oriented application within a mixed-workload database environment. OO features such as inheritance and encapsulation are implemented to aid the project's philosophy of rapid prototyping and interface consistency. Object framework of PowerBuilder Foundation Classes was used to provide services such as standard Windows extended row selection features and printingservices. Responsible for maintaining configuration management records and workflow of database upgrades.

CTX Corporation

Software Development Manger/Software Engineer

In support of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), responsibilities consisted of developing a multi-user Microsoft Access application to aid the implementation of various facets (physical configurations, power requirements, etc.) of multiple FAA programs at a single airport. Implemented relational database design concepts, performed database tool trade-off analysis, and integrated disparate data sources. Aided in migrating a manually intensive financial tracking system to an automated desktop database system. Migration involved data definition and analysis and database and application design. Participated in the integration of COTS products such as FoxPro for Windows and Microsoft Project. Responsible for data collection, application development and testing. Integrated multiple legacy databases and PC products.Systems Engineer/Database Manager Responsibilities consisted of database design and development for a federal government customer. Design used Microsoft Internet Information Server to publish and interact with Microsoft Access databases. Employed Windows NT Internet Database Connector (IDC) technology to connect Microsoft Access databases to a Web-based front-end. IDC scripts produced dynamic HTML and performed SQL operations on database tables. Developed a method to build a database of hyperlinks using Access 95. Incorporated files and images external to the database and web servers. Built and deployed server databases and client application for purchase tracking, inventory, technology development, equipment delivery, and configuration management. Responsible for gathering requirements through customer interviews, database design, and application design. Also responsible for application documentation including developer's guides, user manuals, and distribution instructions.

Lockheed Martin

Database Administrator/Project Engineer

Supervised naval aviation candidates awaiting flight school.

US Navy

Division Officer

Aided in requirements analysis and design of an automated student organization registration system.

Neal Borkert