BradSnobar

Senior C# Developer Architect.

Brad Snobar’s word formatted resume can be downloaded here.

SUMMARY

13 years software veteran with a proven track record at fortune 500 companies such as Expedia, Microsoft, Real Networks, Hasbro, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and WebMD. Expertise across technology disciplines ranging from development, to test, to management while designing and implementing large software systems using new best practices, and integration of existing infrastructure.

13 years expert experience using C# and .Net while working for some of the largest companies in the world.  Emphasis on working to improve complex systems that involve n-tier architecture using modern best practices such as WCF, SOA, and MVC.

Management experience includes owning and operating a retail store for 4 years, leading an Agile team for Windows Live Mobile at Microsoft, and lead development experience for several companies.  Experience managing agile teams (B.S. in Project Management) includes managing onsite resources as well as offshore resources in China and India.  Focus is on communication while using an analytical approach along with the Agile paradigm.

Excellent C# developer with experience starting at the inception of C# while working at Microsoft during the introduction of the language.  Created some of the very first programs written in the language.  Programming experience includes work on all stages of n-tier design and SOA implementation while performing tasks such as Web development, creating network protocols, WinForms development, SOAP WebServices, WCF, and most other Microsoft based technologies.  Cross language and porting experience includes projects in several other familiar languages such as Pascal, VB, VBScript, PHP, C++, and Python.  JavaScript experience includes web experience and a Firefox extension to perform fast artificial intelligence parsing and categorization of internet content.

Web programming (PHP, ASP.Net, and MVC) experience includes development on several websites such as RollingStone.com, Expedia.com, PlainWalkerPoints.com, and PaxPuzzle.com.

Database experience focus is primarily on Microsoft SQL server with 7 years of experience, though experience also includes a year or more each of Oracle, MySql, and PostgresSql.

Test experience includes testing large distributed systems.  Created test harnesses against large software products such as Exchange server, and BizTalk Server.  In addition to in house developed test harnesses, experience also includes common off the shelf products like Quick Test Pro.

Software Design is Messy

Software design is messy.  Embrace the mess. Research involves mixing something old with something new. So, let’s make a twist on the idea of what a web spider does.

Use Case

Power users care about new technology trends as they happen.  Interests span a variety of topics and industries and time is valuable.  Typically the user visits the same sites on a regular basis and is bored with the same old topics and bias.  Give us something new.

I want an application that will continuously update me about new information about whatever I care about.  For example, if I care about a given industry sector such as health advances relating to eye care, then I would usually go to a search engine and type in some keywords relating to that, sift through the resulting topics, and then refine my search until I found something interesting.  I would then read about it and think about its meaning.

Software can do that for me.  Topics should be very recent (less than 3 days in age), instead of the typical minimum 4 week age.

The information must be relevant to me.

Typical search engines rank relevancy based on criteria that applies to a large audience, so that means a given result is usually old because over time it can become popular and meaningful to a larger group of people.  I don’t care about that type of relevancy.  I want new information, that is also not way off topic, but I’m willing to give up some relevancy because I am going to be getting results streamed to me continuously and I will happily find ways to ignore results that I don’t care about.

And, since I am not a giant search engine, there won’t be people trying to game the system with search engine optimizations that will make my rank appear incorrectly high.  Nope, erroneous results will be purely caused by defects in the application that I create.  This is a price I will gladly pay, since I will have the ability to implement fixes for those defects since I will have access to the source code of the application.

Messy Design

In order to accomplish this task a simple diagram of the User Interface captures much of the overall requirements, and then a rough draft of the system gets created.

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Plan for Violence of Action.

Make versus Buy

Violence of action means making a decision now.  Sometimes the best decision fills the immediate needs of the client.  Remember to not spend much time on tasks that don’t progress you towards your goal quickly. Personally, I prefer to use a one day time box as a trigger.  If it takes longer than a day then I should re-evaluate whether I am making the correct technical decision.

Ask yourself these questions to determine a good make versus buy decision:

Does an off the shelf product exist for your situation? Yes?

… Buy it.

Is there a company the specializes in doing what you are trying to do? Yes?

… Pay them to do it for you.

Is the solution a primary revenue driver for your company? Yes?

… Then build it in house because you have the most to gain from success, and the most to lose from failure.  External partners won’t have to close up shop if they let your product die, but your company might.  If you don’t have the personnel to build it, then hire a staffing firm and send some internal candidates to get training to perform oversight.

Remember, planning will only help you know what to do… doing it is up to you.

Tracking Software

After you find something that works, then get down to the action and move on. I found several candidates for defect tracking and project management that fit the requirements (free and popular).  Two other examples met those requirements: Bugzilla, and Mantis.

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Plan First. Then Design, Implement, and Test.

Many research projects will live on this site.

The first research article will be on network protocols.  Example network protocols include those for file transfer, website traffic, and email: FTP, HTTP, and SMTP.

Implementations of those protocols will be created with enough detail to support further research topics.  This topic will provide a good trial to create the underpinnings of the site before moving on to more difficult research topics.

Plan

The plan depends on user scenarios and requirements to build a foundation for a solid project.  To make this easier we will use software to help track development of each topic.

Tracking development topics requires the following actions:

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