Trilogy: I developed an electronic supply chain for a Trilogy-incubated startup company called CarOrder.com, The basic idea and motivation behind my work was to cut out the automotive dealerships and replace them with more efficient e-dealerships. This integrated, nationwide inventory, order tracking and supply chain system drastically reduced overhead cost and fulfillment time, and enabled new, profitable pricing strategies. The electronic system, far ahead of current dealership management systems, was critical for scaling the operation. It not only automated the majority of the process, but also halved the order fulfillment time, and tripled profits per car. This project was eventually integrated into a joint venture with Ford, and unfortunately undone when Nasser was later ousted. Even as .com crazes go, Trilogy was exceptional; it had an incredible recruiting budget, plenty of good food in the company kitchens, parties every week, and lots of other unnecessary perks. I miss those days of Wall Street folly: negative cash flows, with promises to make it up on volume.

IBM: (Toronto) I worked with the DB2 group at IBM's Toronto Lab. One of my projects was to design and prototype a low latency, high throughput, reliable communication layer (replacing TCP/IP) between nodes in database cluster using a new industry communication architecture called VIA. I then studied improvements this made for performance in the industry standard TPC-D database query benchmark. The work was a great success, and got good, visible press coverage. Another project involved prototyping a plugin architecture for the DB2 communication layer allowing for modular listeners that would enable DB2 server to speak multiple protocols, such as CORBA and JDBC, with clients. I then studied the feasibility of running servlets directly within the engine (reducing a tier of indirection) for improved performance of websites, e-commerce and other database-driven applications. (Almaden) In 1999, I worked for a while at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, in the Exploratory Database Group to conduct research on semi-structure query languages.

Microsoft: I worked for Microsoft, in the Office Development Group. Office 97 shipped a while ago, but did you notice the new toolbars and menubars? Actually, they are called command bars, because they are really instances of the same thing. That is what my team worked on, and there are many more issues than you might think! In fact, the project was so successful that the technology is ubiquitous now: existing everywhere from Internet Explorer and Windows XP to the Visual Development suites. It was exciting to work on popular software and know that my code would eventually be replicated millions of times over. I also got to meet BillG, and witness the huge fanfare surrounding the Windows 95 and Office 95 releases.

VICC: The Vehicle Information Center of Canada (VICC) analyses national vehicle accident data and produces rate-pages (statistical summaries) that are purchased by insurance companies across Canada. As a consultant to them, I designed custom applications, to automate and considerably accelerate the rate-page production, which used to take days of tedious manual labour and now takes a few minutes of computer processing. This allows more timely updates, better service and added income. I also took steps to increase the security and reliability of their data infrastructure.

ATI: ATI targets the high-end computer graphics market. Since software drivers for their hardware are always needed urgently after the card is completed, driver testing constitutes a significant bottleneck in the pre-production process. Drivers need to be tested under hundreds of different hardware and software conditions. I designed an automated software testing harness for the Windows product-line drivers, to speed up this phase without compromising the testing integrity and product quality.

Technical skills: An incomplete "laundry list" of technologies, standards, protocols, systems and applications that I am either proficient in or have significant experience with --

• Languages: C, C++, Java, OOP, Python, Ruby, Perl, Unix tools, VB, Pascal, Ada, Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, Prolog, ASM, TeX
• Web: X/HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, JSP, PHP, CGI, servlets, Apache, IIS, Roxen/Pike
• Networking: TCP, UDP, IP; HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP, LDAP; RMI, SOAP Jini, eSpeak
• Database/Data processing: SQL, ODBC, JDBC, IBM DB2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLServer, SAP, SAS, Access
• OS: Unix (Linux, Solaris, X), Linux (KDE, Gnome), Win 2k/CE/NT/95 (Win32API, COM, OLE, other Win APIs), DOS.
• Apps: Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access), Smartsuite, StarOffice, Corel, AutoSketch, PageMaker, Photoshop, PaintShop, Gimp