Website - Curriculum Vitae

Installed Debian GNU/Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on various kinds of machines using various methods (bootstrap, CD, USB drive, PXE)
Made a database of information about the machines in our machine room
Worked with cfengine, the software used to propagate configuration settings across many machines
Performed diagnostics on machines that are unresponsive
Designed an incident report database, with Python-based CLI interface for adding new incidents and a PostgreSQL backend

Purdue University - Teaching Assistant

Location: West Lafayette, Indiana
Duration: Jan. 2006 - Apr. 2006

Assisted in the grading and lab proctoring for the C Programming for Engineers course that is offered at Purdue.

Supervised labs
Provided assistance in labs
Graded homework and lab submissions
Maintained a lab-specific website

Bethel College - Database programmer

Location: Mishawaka, Indiana
Duration: 2003 - 2004

Crafted reports for Admissions Office, Registrar, Nurse, and Student Services. This involved using the INFORMIX database software.

Fulfilled Solomon Report requests as mandated by the Federal Government
Verified the integrity and consistency of the central database
Prepared AdmProfs, which is a Perl program that can generate XHTML 1.0 compliant reports for a variety of incoming student test scores
Documented the process of comparing address data from an external source with database records by using several UNIX command line tools

Bethel College - Admissions Office intern

Location: Mishawaka, Indiana
Duration: 2002 - 2003

Involved myself with various functions of the Admissions Office.

Answered phones
Entered and corrected prospective student data in the central database
Provided unofficial technical support to the Admissions staff
Mailed pamphlets and letters

Research experience

Purdue University - Undergraduate research

Duration: Fall 2007
Supervisor: Suresh Jagannathan

Updated the Kali branch of Scheme 48 with the latest development changes and implement additional functionality, as specified by my supervisor.

Migrated changes from Subversion to Mercurial, keeping track of merged changesets and authorship data.
Used placeholder variables to cause a command to wait until a particular state in another thread has been reached.
Changed code to use a more up-to-date conditions library.
Worked out several dependency issues when building the Scheme 48 image.

Affiliations

Associate member of the Free Software Foundation
Member and administrator of the Internet Hosting Co-Operative

Hobby projects

I work on several hobby projects that are associated with the Free Software movement. While this work is often its own reward, I believe that I gain valuable and marketable skills from it.

Maintainer of Emacs Muse, a text publishing mode for Emacs which aims for inclusion in Emacs
Release manager and Debian packager for ERC, an IRC client that runs in Emacs
Maintainer of EMMS, a music player for Emacs
Contributor to (and former maintainer of) Planner Mode, a TODO list manager and life organizer for Emacs
Contributor to DVC, an interface for using distributed version control systems with Emacs.
Contributor to ErBot, an IRC bot that runs in Emacs

An enumeration of some of these skills follows, by project.

Emacs Muse

In-place markup of text to other formats
Wrote entire manual in TexInfo format
Context-sensitive escaping of special characters
Pre and post-parsing data structures for user configuration
Build simple and effective interfaces for customization of software options
Resolution of file links across "project" boundaries
Efficient and effective use of regular expressions
Interoperability with external packages that provide spell-checking and other features
Nest several types of lists according to level of indentation

ERC

Refactor code around an abstract object
Use the correct character coding system for output depending on context
Merge functionality from a similar project
Enhance product compatibility and interoperability for several different clients
Keep track of copyright assignments and permissible use of code from contributors
Re-use chat windows when the client reconnects to the server
Research ways of aligning timestamps on the right of the screen

EMMS

Add support for MusicPD in EMMS, which involves the following.

Sync contents of EMMS playlist to MusicPD, and vice versa
Write a timer function to detect song change and change of playlist
Retrieve track metadata
Implement a process sentinel function
Adapt existing transaction queue code so that it sends input only when the server process is ready for it, and then contribute my changes back upstream
Implement a send-command interface using closures and callbacks
Cause the description for each track in the current playlist to be updated in an asynchronous manner

Planner

Fix bugs by making atomic changes
Process user requests and schedule implementation
Implement a Makefile-based compilation system
Hone package-related metadata
Successfully synthesize contributions from multiple contributors
Keep track of file authorship

ErBot

Fix stack overflow exploits
Implement retrieval of acronym definitions
Fix arbitrary execution of code exploits
Analyze binary tree data for safe evaluation
Prepare Makefiles that rely on an external (and convenient) compilation system

Core competencies

Programming
OS installation
Automation in system configuration
Documentation

Technical proficiencies

Platforms: 7 years of experience with GNU/Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, Debian, Ubuntu), 4 years of experience with UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris), Windows 95/98/2000/XP
Languages: C/C++, Emacs Lisp, Java, ANSI Common Lisp, Scheme, ML97, SQL, Perl, Python, Bash shell script, DOS batch script
Services: Apache (1.x and 2.x), Courier, Cron, Exim (3 and 4), MySQL, PostgreSQL, OpenLDAP, rsync, shorewall, Squirrelmail, SSH
Other: Git, Subversion, CVS, Bazaar, Mercurial, Darcs, Makefiles, Debian packaging, cfengine

Achievements and involvements

Community service

Completed 20 hours of community service in the city of Elkhart, Indiana
Completed 20 hours of community service around Mishawaka, Indiana

Honors

Chess Club champion 1999-2001 at Penn High School
Inclusion in the National Dean's List 2002-2003
Inclusion in the 2002 United States Achievement Academy yearbook
3rd place - high school individual division - 2002 Indiana Student Software Awards Competition (ISSAC)
2nd place team in the David Ricardo division of the 2002 Indiana Economics Challenge
Graduated with Academic Honors Diploma from high school

Activities

Students Against Destructive Decisions club for 2 semesters
Bethel College Student Senate for 2 semesters
Founded the Bethel College Linux Users Group and was involved for 2 semesters
Webmaster of the Purdue Linux Users Group in 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2006-2007
- Built LDAP and NFS infrastructure
- Provided documentation for use by future webmasters
Vice President of the Purdue Linux Users Group in 2005-2006, 2006-2007
Acting President of the Purdue Linux Users Group from Jan. 2007 through Apr. 2007
Founding member of the Ubuntu-elisp group on http://launchpad.net, which helps to maintain Emacs-based packages for Ubuntu Linux
- Prepared Ubuntu packages for Emacs 22
- Packaged new version of AucTeX for Ubuntu
- Sent out patches for around 7 different packages in order to support a new release of Emacs
- Took over maintenance of the Debian and Ubuntu packages for CEDET and JDEE.

About Me

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Last updated Jul. 22, 2008