Resumé July 2007
Summary of Andy Dent
· 25 Years experience to-date in roles ranging from VAX/VMS Systems Programmer and Systems Manager to Application Development on Macintosh, Windows and Unix.
· Main languages – Python and C++
· Highly experienced in information mapping, graphical application development and real-time processing issues.
· 8 years’ experience interfacing C++ to databases.
· 6 years’ experience working on shrink-wrap software products used by tens of thousands of users.
· Highly experienced at reverse-engineering, debugging and maintaining other people’s source code.
· Years of experience training end users as well as mentoring junior programmers.
Professional Interests
· C++ API’s and framework-based development.
· Rapid development with Python
· User-interface design and software usability.
· Software processes for small teams and individuals.
· Application-development tools and code generators.
· Image processing and Visualisation.
Other Interests
· Chinese Martial Arts
· Scuba diving
· Solar house design.
· Industrial design.
References available on requestPERSONAL DETAILS
Name: Andrew (Andy) Stephen Dent
Address: 17 Water Crest Gardens
WESTERN AUSTRALIA 6018
Telephone: 08 9203 9626 (Home)
0416 249 271 (Mobile)
Email:
http://www.andydent.com/
Citizenship: Naturalised Australian Citizen, dual UK Citizen holding European passport
QUALIFICATIONS
Bachelor of Science (Curtin) in Multi-disciplinary science, majoring in Computer Science with minors in Japanese, Creative Writing and Accounting.
Industry courses in:
· OpenDoc programming
· Usability Essentials for Rapid Development
· 4th Dimension advanced programming & Server API
· Software Testing
· VMS Systems Management & Systems Programming
· VMS Performance Management
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Member Australian Computer Society
(on WA Branch Committee 94-99)
Member Software Engineering Forum, Engineers Australia industry-academia
liason committee
Main points of Employment History including Consulting projects:
Dec 2003 to date
/Senior Software Engineer
Computational Geoscience group
CSIRO
/See http://www.em.csiro.au/comp_geo/compgeo.htm
Andy has filled his usual roles of mentoring and providing a source of expertise to co-workers in OO design and especially complex c++ logic. His role includes architecture development for service-oriented architectures handling complex geoscience data (larger and more complex than most business SOA), as well as GUI applications in Python and C++ for scientific data presentation. He has taught XML data modelling courses and consulted in the geo-spatial information realm on architecture and scenarios for projects such as the ASIBA Emergency Services demonstrator. This full-time employment was preceded by several months contract work on a C++ scientific visualisation and J2EE database application.
Aug 2002 to Oct 2003
/Multiple platform development
/IBVA (USA) marketed a personal brainwave device which allows the user to trigger actions and view their brainwaves from a radio transmitter. The company still maintains a website but went out of business in 2004. A separate IBVA UK company sells the more recent version of the product with updated Macintosh software from the original Japanese developer. The relationship between the USA company and the current operations is unclear.
Andy was engaged initially to port some Macintosh code to Windows and this grew into writing a complete multi-platform new generation of the software. Instead of just libraries of code used by local programs, a client-server approach was taken where remote programs could register for notifications or data receipt. The server ran on Windows, PocketPC and Macintosh with clients on those platforms plus a Python and native Flash client. This project involved the combination of real-time FFT processing with graphing and push-pull client-server communications.
Nov 2001 to July 2002
/Senior Software Engineer
SuperSoftware International Pty Ltd
/SuperSoftware was a startup company housed in the Entrepeneurs-in-Residence program in the Technology Park. They have developed a Vehicle Identikit System currently being marketed to police forces around Australia and internationally. The product includes searchable vehicle databases and a unique ability for users to customise 3D models of cars to provide material for police, news broadcasts and Internet distribution. Whilst in development, the IVIS product was used by WA police to arrest suspects in two murders and in other investigations around Australia. The company failed to receive its planned initial sale from the WA Police (for reasons unrelated to product suitability or quality) and was not able to secure other sales in time to avoid exhausting its startup funding and shutting down.
Andy was involved in all phases of product development including GUI design and programming, debugging the object-relational database and enhancing the OOFILE report writer to process images. Other important roles included mentoring junior staff and working with the CTO on software processes and architecture.
June 2001 to July 2001
/Debugger
Digital Voodoo Pty Ltd
/Digital Voodoo is an Australian success story – a private company based in Melbourne with approximately 20% of the world-wide market in broadcast-quality video editing cards. They are a lean operation with hardware engineers working closely with the real-time software engineers to provide drivers and visual effect plugins. Further information can be found at the web site http://www.digitalvoodoo.net
Andy was flown over to their Melbourne office for an urgent and successful trouble-shooting assignment in real-time image processing. Details restricted due to NDA but they are happy to be a reference site.
July 1999 to October 2001
/Software Engineer
Dynamic Digital Depth
/Dynamic Digital Depth is a public company with USA head-office and an R&D centre in Australia, specialising in 3D movies and other visual technology DDD markets glasses-free displays for advertising stands, converts existing movies to 3D format and distributes 3D movies via the Internet. Further information, movies and free downloads of their award-winning OpticBOOM™ product can be found at the web site http://www.ddd.com
Andy was initially engaged to commercialise some research software for displaying 3D movies via Apple’s QuickTime format, written in C and C++.
With the growth of the Internet economy, these movies quickly became the focus of the company and the 3D movies required highly-innovative technology to protect them from copying.
Andy took a lead role in designing the consumer product to provide easy on-screen adjustment of the 3D experience, as the movies were playing, eliminating the need for a support centre.
As a widespread consumer product, the OpticBOOM™ technology he developed worked on a broad range of Macintosh and Windows computers without crashes and requiring no support department.
His final changes to OpticBOOM were adding a serial interface to a glasses-free 3D display, allowing the user to press a 3D on/off button to influence the program. This required reverse-engineering the serial protocol of the display and writing Windows serial I/O code in a COM control.
He also ported an image-editing Java application to C++ to provide increased performance.
Other tasks undertaken during Andy’s employment included acting as project manager and mentoring other staff in advanced C++ and Windows programming.
Apr 1995 to June 1999
/Software Engineer &
Product Designer
Mercator Software Pty Ltd
/Mercator Software is a private company leading the world in the field of Outcome-based Education. Their teacher-support software has been used as a standard in NSW and Victoria for years and is now used in other states and in the USA. They are a small company producing software for use by tens of thousands of teachers on typical school and home computers, both Macintosh and Windows. Further information can be found at the web site http://www.mercator.com.au
Andy was initially engaged to advise Mercator on ways to improve their software process and technologies for cross-platform development. They were keen to take their existing VB program to Macintosh, due to pressure from Apple and potential US customers.
After Mercator received funding for their Mac version, Andy developed a new look-and-feel for the program and created C++ programming tools to aid in rapid development. This included a report-writer which had to match the existing Crystal Reports features.
Andy continued design work and mentored the existing VB programmers at Mercator as they moved over to the Mac project.
Andy developed Macintosh-Windows porting technology so the new Mac programs could be rapidly ported, achieving 98% code reuse of business logic and automatic generation of Windows screens. This first Windows version shipped with Win32s support on Windows 3.1 as well as Windows 95 and NT. The porting technology allowed a large program to run faster than the VB original and faster than any porting solutions previously available.
Andy’s final task for Mercator was expansion of the report-writer to add XML processing, enabling an entire report to be saved as an XML document and edited within the report. Mercator now ship this as their Portfolio free document viewer.
July 1989 to August 1995
/Consultant
AD Software
/AD Software is Andy’s own company through which he performs Macintosh and VAX/VMS systems development and consulting. He has also worked as a professional trainer for Digital Equipment (VAX Systems Management) and Winthrop Technology (Macintosh and Excel). His employees have included telecommuters in the Czech Republic and local junior programmers
Apart from consulting activities, AD Software retails their OOFILE and PP2MFC c++ cross-platform database and application development tools worldwide. Further information, and product samples can be found at the web site http://www.oofile.com.au
Major Clients
Client: PrintForce Australia
/Website rebuilder
/PrintForce are Australia’s largest Real Estate printer, printing brochures, cards, and all other materials for many agents. One part of their services is to publish all houses that they print on their website. This results in over 1,000 houses per week appearing and disappearing from the site. The site indexes houses by both geographical area and agent and requires those indexes updating rapidly – when an agent sends an ad proof in, they expect to see the ad on the website within hours. They use Quark Express extensions to generate web pages from each ad but the updating of the site index pages is a complex and regular task.
At the time they engaged Andy, the index rebuilding was accomplished by an AppleScript which took approximately 40 hours to run on a top-end Mac. Due to the complexity of the script, it often did not complete the task and there was no way to satisfy the need for agent’s desire to see the ads on the site the same day.
Andy replaced the scripted rebuild with a C++ solution that rebuilt the sight approximately 70 times faster, using an ISAM database instead of scripted calls to FileMaker. The new solution also made it easy to rebuild a portion of the site, within a few minutes.
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Client: Heritage Council of WA
/Enterprise-wide information management
/HCWA employs a mixture of volunteer and professional staff with widely ranging computer skills. They need to answer complex queries from Ministerial level as well as public calls. Their records management workload is considerable and files move constantly. Expert users must be able to build up reports and queries but the system has to be used by casual staff with little time for training
This broad client-server database provides histories and extensive descriptions of sites, grants management and a records-management facility with bar-coding of physical files. A particular feature is the keyword searching and reporting subsystem which allows searches and reports across the entire range of information stored
Client: Real Estate Institute of WA
/“HomeBuyer” Magazine Page layout automation, publishing and databases.
/REIWA produce their weekly magazine of home ads from members, including photographic information and house details. They group ads by agent and suburb to create the best impression of agent size and must be able to change page layouts quickly
Andy was hired by REIWA to help them print the magazine on local laser printers, rather than sending coded text files out to a printshop. The savings on this project were considerable enabling them to proceed with fully-automatic page layout. Instead of an editor and assistants spending a day grouping ads by hand, Andy’s Object Pascal system did it in minutes. The net saving was an entire day in the weekly magazine’s production process. This system was refined and used for years until their decision to go for a wholly digital prepress colour production in-house. The magazine is now all colour but still doesn’t match the flexibility of the previous layout system.
Andy also developed a distributed system (in C++) for entering and printing classified advertisements but REIWA decided that classifieds publishing didn’t fit the magazine image. The classifieds system included a custom-built word processing engine to allow operators to quote on the ad lineage as they took phone entries.
Other minor tasks for REIWA were BP Fuelcard data collation and directory sorting and printing systems, written in Turbo Pascal and FoxPro (dBase).
Client: Department of Transport
/Databases, Program Conversion and Terminal Emulation
/At the time Andy worked with them, the department had a Macintosh on most desks alongside the serial terminals for the Pick-based administration systems. They were keen to move more people to Macintosh for the lower support costs but had to keep access to the Pick system.
Andy’s first engagement with Transport was to rewrite a Macintosh terminal emulation package to the Freedom-100 standard used on the Pick system. This required huge modifications to the open source NCSA Telnet, in C.
The department later required a suite of FORTRAN modelling programs converting to Object Pascal, to port them from Windows to Macintosh (Mac FORTRAN at the time being inadequate). The ported software was of such complexity that Andy wrote an automatic language converter as well as a complete set of FORTRAN formatted input-output libraries, in Object Pascal.
Other systems developed for the department included a range of databases for; Ministerial reporting, Bikewest Cycling Hazard reports and records management.
Client: Summit Homes
/Bill of Materials expert system
/Summit Homes are one of Perth’s largest builders, particularly in the field of extensions. They have long been users of ArchiCAD™ for drafting as well as displaying design alternatives to clients
Andy was engaged to help automate the gap between ArchiCAD drawing exported files and the bill of materials system. He developed a rule-based system for taking dimensions from the drawing and calculating quantities The system was like an ultra-specific spreadsheet, including the ability to ask the user for details not on the drawing (“What is the roof pitch”). Most importantly, all the rules are user-defined. Summit were able to continue refining their rules for years without Andy’s further involvement.