Work Experience

My Work Expe­ri­ence and Who I am, Professionally-Speaking

I spent the last 6 years at Motorola and am cur­rently a senior sys­tem engi­neer, trou­bleshooter, and trainer. My expe­ri­ence writ­ing auto­mated test soft­ware and main­tain­ing real-world deploy­ments has made me an excel­lent trou­bleshooter. I have proven my inter­per­sonal skills and polit­i­cal aware­ness over sev­eral years of close cus­tomer work, includ­ing 18 months' deploy­ment over­seas to han­dle our many Euro­pean clients.

I am the go-to guy when a sit­u­a­tion calls for an excel­lent engi­neer who can be put in close con­tact with a cus­tomer. I solve the prob­lem, straighten out con­fu­sion, jump­start stalled projects, and gen­er­ally fix the hell out of the situation.

I am also the pri­mary trainer for my soft­ware group. I design and present classes for clients around the world and other engi­neers within Motorola. My train­ing classes have cov­ered our software's design, oper­a­tions, and devel­op­ment as well as gen­eral holis­tic train­ing on trou­bleshoot­ing com­plex sys­tems and advanced tech­ni­cal topics.

My daily work brings me in close con­tact with Linux, Solaris, Ora­cle data­base, Sun Clus­ter, SOAP Web­ser­vices, and the Resin web­server. My past expe­ri­ence adds a raft of other plat­forms in many combinations.

My pri­mary tools for prob­lem solv­ing are unix command-line tools and Python. I am an expe­ri­ence Python pro­gram­mer with good expe­ri­ence in writ­ing web­ser­vices with Django and Bottle.

I have always been inter­ested in process improve­ment and apply this con­stantly within my group. I cre­ated and main­tain sev­eral "best prac­tices" doc­u­ments for our group that have led to stan­dard­ized instal­la­tion prac­tices. In my spare time at work I write up new and inter­est­ing prob­lems I've recently encoun­tered includ­ing detailed trou­bleshoot­ing processes lead­ing up to a solu­tion. The pur­pose is to spread knowl­edge but also trou­bleshoot­ing strat­egy ideas to my col­leagues. I encour­age my col­leagues to do the same, and we are now col­lect­ing these into a shared wiki/document site for our Oper­a­tions & Sup­port group.

Recently I was asked to join the Soft­ware Pedi­gree Review Board at Motorola. The SPRB's role is to ensure that Motorola prod­ucts fol­low soft­ware license, both open source and com­mer­cial. Indi­vid­ual SPRB mem­bers guide soft­ware prod­ucts through a detailed audit, car­ry­ing out reme­di­a­tion steps, and also work to improve Motorola's aware­ness of code licens­ing gen­er­ally. It is quite an honor to join this group.

Work Expe­ri­ence

Sys­tem Engi­neer at Motorola Mobil­ity for 4 years. Pre­vi­ously was an QA Automa­tion Engi­neer for 2 years. (Note, started with Netopia which was acquired by Motorola in 2007).

Co-Op Engi­neer at ADTRAN in Huntsville, Alabama. Worked full-time every other semes­ter in a vari­ety of soft­ware engi­neer­ing jobs.

Edu­ca­tion

Start­ing an Exec­u­tive MBA at UMKC (Uni­ver­sity of Mis­souri, Kansas City) in August 2012

Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Com­puter Engi­neer­ing from the Uni­ver­sity of Alabama in Huntsville