Work Life

Currently I'm the Vice President of Engineering at Owners.com, a self-directed realty portal.  I thank Scott Farrar for the idea of combining my professional interest in Web technologies with my family background in construction and real estate.  Our goal at Owners.com is to be the "E*TRADE of real estate", that is, to provide a website where buyers and sellers are matched and both are provided with online tools to facilitate a realty transaction without the services of a realty agent.
 

Most recently I was the Director of Research and Development at Embarcadero Systems Corp. (ESC) in Alameda, CA, located just north of the Oakland airport. ESC is the software subsidiary of a marine transportation company based in San Francisco.  ESC is developing software for transportation logistics management, starting with marine terminals.  While the application domain is somewhat boring, the technology is first-rate: object-oriented, design-driven implementation of a multi-tier architecture.  Alas, upper management decided against targeting a commercial product, rolled the development staff into the IT organization, and riffed those of us mainly involved in commercialization.
 

Before ESC, I was the Director of Engineering at ObjectSwitch Corp., where I led the development of the ObjectSwitch product line. ObjectSwitch is middleware oriented toward the telecommunications industry: a persistent, transactional object store with an event bus for managing the communication among divergent applications that may not have been developed with interoperability as a design goal.  It's interesting work with a bright future, I believe.  But ObjectSwitch was unable to execute on its business plan, so I left for financial reasons.
 

Before ObjectSwitch, I was the Chief Technology Officer of vivid studios, where I oversaw research and development of key Internet technologies, established and maintained strategic relationships, interfaced with the press on technical issues, and helped with general business development and client relationships. vivid is an gen-X Internet design studio located in the heart of Multimedia Gulch, which many have called the epicenter of the World-Wide Web.  Unfortunately, vivid overextended itself financially at one point and was unable to pay its employees, so I regrettably left for more gainful employment.  vivid studios is now a division of Modem Media.
 

I came to vivid from what is now the Java Software division of Sun Microsystems. I'm the guy that provided daily managerial leadership to the ~25-person Java/HotJava group during the 14-month period from when it was retargeted to the Internet up until its phenomenal success in the spring of 1995. (See the picture of the original Java team.)  That time is undoubtedly the pinnacle of my career to date. I have never before worked with such a talented and dedicated (albeit at times, high-strung) group of software professionals. Why I'm still not there is an interesting, largely untold story of the risks of being involved in a controversial, wildly successful project within a highly political industrial climate.
 

Before Java, I worked for four years at Microtec Research, an embedded systems tools company that's now a division of Mentor Graphics. At Microtec I created the Educational Services group and later help create the Consulting Services group, which together formed the Professional Services business unit within Microtec. I developed and taught courses on the Microtec toolkit, managed a small staff of trainers and consultants, and even served as the initial product marketing manager for Professional Services. I refer to the Microtec years as my "sabbatical" from technology management.
 

The four years prior to Microtec, I was the engineering manager for what is now the SPARCompiler Product Family in what is now the Sun Software division of Sun Microsystems. The achievement there of which I'm most proud is orchestrating the effort to unbundled FORTRAN, Pascal, and later C from the Solaris operating system and to ship them as revenue-generating products with their own release schedules and client bases. It was done in the midst of great internal resistance, as hard as that may be to imagine today. And yet it resulted in a multi-million dollar annual revenue stream to Sun. I created the infrastructure necessary to make this happen and led the group of up to ~20 folks that pulled this off over a two or three year period.
 

Prior to Sun, I worked for over seven years at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. My major accomplishment there was to have been an early contributor to the SPECTRUM project, which is now known as the PA-RISC architecture. It was a highly successful "bet the company" play by HP to become a first-tier computer company. I was around employee number 15 on the project. I was not a member of the original core group of 12 or so who designed the hardware and software architecture, but I was part of the second wave of folks on the project to prototype the architecture and its software. I wrote portions of the C compiler front-end, sections of the globally optimizing back-end, and the entire original peephole optimizer.
 

Before HP Labs, I began my professional career as the first professor of Computer Science at San Francisco State University. Others taught Computer Science courses before my arrival, but I was the first professor who only taught Computer Science courses and also the first one to hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

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