I’m currently an Associate Technical Fellow at Walmart, based in the Bellevue, WA Global Technology office. I work primarily in fraud detection but as a senior technical leader I work across a number of programs in different teams.

History

I am a software geek, starting at high school with an accidental fall into computer science. Programming in school was in BBC BASIC, although at home I used Turbo Pascal as well as some 6502. It turned out I didn’t entirely suck at it so I decided to stick with it. At college (6th form, or ages 17-18 for the non-British reader) we had a teacher that decided we should learn something we could actually get paid for which meant COBOL running on a Digitial Equipment Corp (DEC) micro-VAX.

During the same time I got a summer and weekend job and when the IT manager learned I was not only studying CS but also learning COBOL he let me loose on their ageing Burroughs mainframe; so I can say with only minor truth-stretching that I have been paid to write COBOL. The company moved from this old system slowly to a departmental mini-computer based on the Pick operating system which was a strange experience (don’t recall the computer make though).

University continued the VAX experience but with the addition of a new language, Ada, which I still like even though it really isn’t fashionable to say so out loud.

My first full-time job was with the now defunct ICL Retail Systems (when looking for something from the ICL days I found this embarressment). Mostly this was C and C++ (Glockenspiel and Zortec on OS/2) although some tools were written in Modula-2 with some experimental Modula-3 usage. This was a great 6 years, I learned so much not just as a professional programmer but also about how to work in teams and the fact that there are always people smarter than you to learn from and so much to learn. I also got to do some exploratory Ada work, also wrote a fun paper entitled Ada-95: A guide for C and C++ programmers which eventually turned into a book. Through this I got to meet some of the leading lights in the language’s design including John Barnes who was very generous with his time as reviewer.

Having moved to the US in 1998 for a brief stint at Microsoft I joined Rational Software in Redmond WA. After Rational’s aquisition by IBM I lived in North Carolina for a period where I worked on a number of developer tools efforts as well as standards. I was active in the architecture of the very cool jazz project, which led to the formation of the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration group. I was also a member of the IBM Software Group Architecture Board which was a lot of fun with some really super-smart people!

I then worked at Amazon from 2009-2026. I also worked on various parts of the back-end of the retail web site as well as the migration of Amazon Fresh into the amazon.com site.

Not-a-Resume

I don’t have one online, but my LinkedIn and Google Scholar profiles should cover things pretty well. Patents are listed in those sites, but also cached locally here, as is my personal writing in bibtex form.

Standards Involvement

There’s some old Point of Sale (PoS) device standards work, but it’s hard to even find references to that work online now. Here’s what does remain.

  • Object Management Group (OMG)
  • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  • RosettaNet (now at GS1)
  • Collaborate Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR)

Footnotes

ICL was a really fun place to work at that time, their VME systems were doing well, they had a range of Unix systems and a big commitment to open systems. However, they never saw an engineering problem they couldn’t develop an expensive and over-engineered solution for! My personal favorite was the DRS 300, a machine that came in modules, each one in a solid chassis that you could use as a step-stool, you strung them together using SCSI cables (even though none of the inner components were ever actually SCSI. They clipped together side by side and you put a blanking plate on each end.

DRS 300

The result was people with 5’ of these damn things across the top of book cases and honestly it ran a version of SVR4 sucky slow.

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