Adam Jonathan Griff, Ph.D. - Work Experience

• GriffMonster, LLC, Boulder, CO. February 2001-Present
  President, Architect, and Principal Consultant
  • Technologies used: Perl, MySQL, C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Linux, Solaris, Eclipse, Degreement Student Advising System
  • President of Degreement.com - student degree audit and advising software system.
    • Architected, designed, developed, and documented system.
    • Integrated advising software with legacy systems and coded degrees into the system.
    • Developed algorithms, UI, and specification languages for degree checking and reporting.
    • Trained and mentored advisers on using the system.
    • Managed directly sales and marketing teams dealing with universities, secondary schools, and state board of education.
    • System design scaled to handle 100K students and several million student course records.
    • Mentored computer science students on coding and designing degree requirements for departments
  • Consulted for various clients utilizing my expertise in distributed systems, client / server architectures, operating systems, open source software.
    • Learned, utilized, and disseminated acquired knowledge of new software.
  Founder, chief architect, and coder of Degreement.com, degree audit and advising software. Software Design for advising students and providing them with easy to read UI of courses taken, how they count towards graduation, requirements not yet satisfied, and options on courses to satisfy the remaining requirements. Provided mechanism for advisers to override and make exceptions to requirements. Designed DB Schema to handle 100K students and several million student course records, wrote the code, algorithms for analysis of courses for matching courses to requirements, syntax used to express requirements, mapping mechanism to synchronize with university student course data stored in an external DB while maintaining local student data regarding exceptions, transfer credits, adviser comments, and other information not present in the university controlled DB. Mentored undergraduate work study students in CS on the workings of the system and had them work on coding and designing degree requirement files for University departments using the software. Trained advisers on the workings of the system, led and managed sales force, worked with the writers on marketing materials, meeting with the users / customers and select future features based on biggest overall needs, feasibility, ROI, and educating customers to why some features could be achieved already in the current design and other features would result in bad design decisions. System is written in Perl with a MySQL back-end. For Degreement also worked in marketing and sales with universities, secondary schools, and state board of education. Consulted for clients on various projects on Linux and FreeBSD platforms using various languages (C++, Java, Perl, PHP, SQL, shell) and using and enhancing various open source software. More information on consulting is available at http://computer.griffmonster.com/

• Democratic National Convention Committee, Denver, CO. August 2008.
  Team Manager
  • Team Manager with the Sustainability and Greening Division of the Democratic National Convention Committee.
  • Managed 125 volunteers and 4 managers in a venue with 30K visitors per day.

• Pancil, LLC, La Jolla, CA. October 2003-January 2009
  Engineer and Architect
  • Technologies used: Perl, MySQL, C++, FreeBSD
  • Architected, designed, developed, and documented network monitoring and notification application.
  • Designed and developed plug-in interface to open source application enabling parsing of custom file formats.
  Pancil, LLC / Sarfall.com best known for their e-learning web site to teach children how to read English. Designed and coded software for network analysis, content parsing and analysis, and process identification and documentation. Designed and coded GMSysMon an application for tracking network connectivity and generating alarms to notify of network and machine failures. It is a light weight application similar to Nagios. The flexible design was then used to generate alarms on other data including overheating of computers, server rooms temperature, CPU load threshold monitoring, bandwidth limits, and more. Made available to open source community. Contributions to the open source Checkbot project. Identified bugs, fixed bugs, enhanced capabilities by adding plug-in interface points to allowing for parsing of custom data and information types. Used the plug-in feature to add the ability to parse custom flash files and produce list of links from the flash programs to pass back to Checkbot for checking validity of links.

• GlobalSight, Boulder, CO. April 2000 - July 2001.
  Principal Software Engineer
  • Technologies used: C++, Java, GlobalSight System3, Interwoven TeamSite, Vignette, Active, WebMethods, Solaris
  • Identified, architected and designed features for globalization and I18N (Internationalization) product.
  • Designed, developed, and documented integrations between I18N product and external products.
  • Managed internal teams for customer integrations and communicated requirements to customers and external vendors that resulted in successful projects.
  • Technical project management for European clients.
  • Collaborated with product marketing and sales teams to develop market requirement documents and prioritize customer features.
  • Mentored fellow developers in best practices and held "brown bag" and training sessions on external vendor products.
  Designed and architected systems for a pre-IPO globalization company. GlobalSight develops software enabling the localization of web sites for international markets. Engineering responsibilities include designing and architecting future products and developing integrations between GlobalSight's existing products and external vendor products. Identified future GlobalSight products and features for evaluation by product marketing. Trained internal employees, partners, and clients to use and install the GlobalSight System3 products and integrations. Identify I18N (Internationalization) issues present in external products (Oracle, Vignette, ATG, Interwoven Teamsite, etc.), develop best practices documentation, and provide I18N training. Assist sales with prospective costumers as special needs arise. Only two time winner of the monthly Presidents Award for outstanding contributions to the company by an employee.

• Ericsson Wireless Communications Inc., Boulder, CO. November 1999 - April 2000.
  Research Engineer
  • Technologies used: Java, Perl, CORBA, Rational Rose Real-Time, Emacs
  • Provided expertise on distributed communication issues.
  • Designed and developed real-time controller interfaces to wireless base stations.
  Designed and developed components for the next generation of CDMA base stations. Utilized Rational Rose Real-Time to model the behavior of the base station and generate real-time code. Developed Java and Perl programs to enable communication via CORBA between the base stations and the remote controllers.

• University of Colorado at Boulder. January - May, August - December 1998.
  Visiting Instructor
  • Technologies used: Java, Perl, C++ STL, Smalltalk, Rational Rose
  • Developed and instructed Object Oriented programming and design course.
  • Guided students in researching and presenting new tools, trends, and techniques.
  • Managed group projects and lead design reviews of industry sponsored projects.
  Instructor for CS4448 - Object Oriented Programming and Design. Developed and taught this course for two semesters using some of the latest tools available as well as using Smalltalk to parley an understanding of the underlying structure of Object Oriented Languages to those with structural language backgrounds. Guided students in researching new areas of computer science from latest journals and on-line sources to present findings for the edification of the students in the class and myself. This course used Squeak implementation of Smalltalk, C++, Rational Rose implementation of UML, C++ STL. Managed group projects and performed design reviews of projects students were working on for industry. Course listing Fall of 1998 and Course listing Spring of 1998.

• University of Colorado at Boulder. January 1998 - November 1999.
  Research Assistant
  • Technologies used: C++, CORBA, VRML, Linux, Emacs, Gryphon
  • Identified location and synchronization inefficiencies in communication subsystems.
  • Architected, designed, and developed a dynamically tailorable distributed object subsystem.
  • Resulted in reduced latency and improved scalability of applications in virtual environment and financial markets.
  • Advised, consulted, and educated on design and implementation of distributed systems for data transparency, location migration, and redundancy.
  Research Assistant worked on the Gryphon system and finishing my dissertation, "Gryphon: A Dynamically Tailorable Mechanism for Customizing Location and Caching Policies in Distributed Object Subsystems." Designed and built an object oriented communication subsystem in C++ built on top of TCP/IP network sockets. Utilized the OO communication subsystem to implement a CORBA-like ORB distributed object subsystem. Identified inefficiencies in communication caused by location and update transparency in CORBA, COM, and other systems. Designed, implemented, and analyzed the Gryphon agents which accept application level hints to enhance performance via location and update policies. Reduced message traffic in the ORB by many orders of magnitude for a variety of application domains. Created Virtual Environment applications, taking advantage of the reduced message traffic and latencies of the Gryphon enhanced ORB. Taught and assisted others in the creation of distributed applications utilizing the Gryphon subsystem. Resulted in insight and software that has been used to reduce latency and bandwidth and improve scalability in various fields from virtual worlds, gaming, and financial markets. Still a cutting edge field in computer science and have discussed my dissertation, its uses, and new offshoot ideas with companies for use in distributed virtual machines, data location mobility and migration, and backup redundancy techniques.

• University of Colorado at Boulder. June - August 1998.
  Research Assistant working on the VPR (Virtual Planning Room) project.

• Dean's Office of the College of Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. January 1995 - Present.
  Graduate Research Assistant and Consultant.
  • Software and services for degree audit at CU. Trained advisors in the use of the system and built up an infer-structure for continued support through hiring, training, and management of support staff. Interacted with other university agencies to acquire student data needed for the advising system.
  • In 1995 Installed Linux to run advising system and the SSL enabled Apache web server.

• University of Colorado at Boulder
  Worked on writing ARPA proposals.
  Met with prospective faculty and gave feedback to hiring committee.

• University of Colorado at Boulder. August - December 1994.
  Research Assistant. Testing communication over FDDI/ATM networks for bandwidth and latency. Part of the BATMAN (Boulder ATM Area Network) and used workstations and KSR-1, Intel Paragon, CM-5, and Cray T3D supercomputers.

• University of Colorado at Boulder. January - August 1994.
  Research Assistant. Worked in the area of performance analysis of PVM based distributed applications. Designed and implemented ParaVision, a tool to aid in the debugging and performance analysis of PVM applications. Used Escallante/ET++, a graphical framework for C++, to create the visualization tools.

• University of Colorado at Boulder. August - December 1993.
  Teaching Assistant for 2 sections of CS 1300 - Introduction to Computing. The introductory course in the computer science department taught in C++. Included teaching recitations, holding office and lab hours, and grading.

• Otsuka Electronics (U.S.A), Inc., Fort Collins, CO. 1992-1993
  Utilized X and Motif calls to construct a ploting and graphical control interface for serial communication between a Sun Sparcstation and controller hardware for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. Performed UNIX system Administration.

• Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. August 1991 - May 1992
  Research Assistant working on the n-cube parallel computer.

• International Business Machines Corporation, Endicott, NY. Summer 1991
  Revised the system responsible for tracking production and quality control of integrated circuits. Utilized the OS2 graphical interface to synchronize the departments involved in the assembly line manufacturing process.

• International Business Machines Corporation, Rochester, MN. Summer 1990
  Integrated Application System/400 CallPath/400 Architecture with telephone switching unit. Created C and CL software to collect Call Detail Records and system alarm messages. Provided technical assistance and tools to the telecommunication switch manufacturer to develop, test, and debug their communication interface.
  

• Thomas J. Lipton, Inc., Englewood, NJ. Summer 1989
  Installed R:Base and Lotus 123 and provided user support for the operation and maintenance of the systems. Designed and developed applications for use by the Insurance and Loss Control Departments which included complex formulas for statistical analysis and future loss projections.

Adam Jonathan Griff, Ph.D., griffcv@griffmonster.com , +01 (303)731-5140