The Long and Winding Road

Grant Parks

Summary of qualifications

• Over 25 years of experience in the design, delivery and support of medium and enterprise-scale systems in broad-ranging industries on heterogeneous platforms.
• Technical leadership of development staff. Relentless process improvement and pursuit of best practices.
• A track record of marrying advanced concepts with current technologies to produce efficient, high-performing systems and implement dramatic advancements in development.
• Consistent improvement of business user experience through standardization and automation.

Professional experience

Liquid Compass, senior developer	7/2011–11/2011	Denver CO
MX Logic/McAfee/Intel, senior engineer	5/2006–7/2011	Englewood CO
Architected and implemented new role-based access control framework. Wrote PHP server for massive e-mail archiving product, providing Web client interface functionality to search and manage e-mail. (McAfee SaaS Email Archiving) Wrote PHP SOAP server to provide internal Web service Partner access to product provisioning functionality. Maintained and enhanced a complex customer-facing portal using Web client technologies, PHP 5 and PostgreSql. Wrote PHP server to provide interface for Web e-mail client, creating lightweight, flexible HTTP connectivity object to robustly and securely support both XML-RPC and REST communication with multiple Berkeley DB XML stores. Helped architect a customer DNS solution to address segregated Berkeley DB containers using customer identification. (McAfee SaaS Email Continuity) Pioneered true object oriented implementations, explored advanced PHP techniques and pushed architecture from everything being a one-off effort to true reusable cohesiveness. Initiated various “skunk works” activities intended to decouple the existing monolithic architecture, increase robustness and unification of design and development and provide testing and data generation tools. Wrote tools to generate XML metadata for Postgres databases and in turn, transform that XML (or any XML document), into graphical mind maps.
CoBank, consultant	1/2006–5/2006	Greenwood Village CO
Architected, developed and implemented a MS SmartDocument authoring solution, using Web services and SharePoint. Application work is done in VB.NET. In the process identified and defined disparate data sources to automate the document authoring. Designed and prototyped an XML-based integration of previously non-captured data into business metadata.
TriZetto Group, consultant	7/2005–12/2005	Greenwood Village CO
Designed and implemented Sybase jobs to migrate client into a hosted environment, reverse engineering COBOL and Korn shell scripts. Mentored team and organization on reusability and consistent implementation across multiple interfaces. Devised and developed ways to integrate Semantic Web technologies and concepts to provide technical and business metadata.
CoBank, consultant	1/2005–6/2005	Greenwood Village CO
Designed and implemented SQL Server jobs to seamlessly integrate new vendor interface with heterogeneous legacy systems. Rewrote cursor-driven procedures using T-SQL set logic. Refactored original process into a modular architecture. Introduced nested DTS execution methods that minimize manual interaction and maximize portability and reusability. Wrote reflective code to produce XML serialization of DTS package, allowing varying transformations, views and analyses of work and data flow.
TriZetto Group, consultant	8/2004–12/2004	Greenwood Village CO
Designed and developed Sybase SQL stored procedures to produce invoice analysis for national health care providers within the Facets and Orbitz insurance applications. Developed reusable solutions for all SQL developers to more easily comply with programming standards and provide better database performance metrics.
Suncorp, consultant	7/2004	Westminster CO
Configured Rational products for automated testing of large financial ASP.NET intranet. Discovered, installed and configured Rational Robot Automation Framework Support (RRAFS), an Open Source product that allows keyword-driven testing and thus adapts automatically to user interface modifications.
NeoForte, consultant	11/2003–4/2004	Englewood, CO
Supported and enhanced large ASP/SQL Server intranet/extranet, refactoring fragmented legacy code. Server and database troubleshooting.
Bits 2 Systems, LLC	3/2002–1/2004	Westminster, CO
Lead Architect, Consultant, Co-Owner
Co-wrote TierScript™, a lightweight, yet powerful, XML client-server programming language running on Microsoft platforms. Enables powerful database Web applications without writing any SQL Server stored procedures, custom server components or server-side scripting in HTML pages. Added dynamic charting/graphing of SQL Server data to an existing ASP application using XSLT and SVG to replace expensive third party graphing tool. Wrote large shareholder accounting system for agricultural cooperative.
Knoware	1/2001–3/2002	Westminster, CO
consultant, technology evangelist, president
Wrote large intranet application to manage Los Alamos Laboratories’ government-mandated environmental cleanup. Replaced traditional ASP programming methods with data-driven, XML managed application flow.
iXL	7/2000–1/2001	Denver, CO
CRM software engineering manager
Partnered with global customers and business analysts to integrate existing vertical information systems into complete customer management systems. Evaluated vendor offerings and custom programming solutions to design automated e-marketing, CRM solutions and information portals for Fortune 500 customers.
Storage Technology	6/1998–7/2000	Louisville, CO
senior system software enginee, lead architect
Automated the software delivery process to global sales force. Drastically reduced size and improved performance of legacy device monitoring and simulation tools. Led successful Y2K conversion of device simulation suite (700+ source modules). Wrote multi-platform hardware monitoring and alarm protocol.
CSG Systems, senior developer/analyst	3/1997–6/1998	Northglenn, CO
Automated quality control checks and program requests, putting updates in the customers’ hands. Developed and maintained online and batch systems to activate and bill cable television and communication systems. Architecting new methods to update system settings without the programming that had traditionally been required.
Lucent Technologies, consultant	1/1997–5/1997	Thornton, CO
Debugged and enhanced proprietary telephony system to support field sales engineers.
Wiland Services/Neodata/EDS	5/1990–9/1996	Boulder, CO
lead architect, team leader, business analyst, software engineer
First and only employee to be officially recognized by the company for innovation. Created the List Lightning™ list order fulfillment product, turning a loss-leader into a cash cow through automation. It is still one of the flagship services offered by the company that acquired EDS’ subscription fulfillment division. I delivered a proof of concept that made the product workable, and then worked with all levels of staff to individually build and deploy this solution. Reinvented the development process by writing macro, function and object libraries to simplify programming. Created the underlying engine to process relational data access requests against mammoth proprietary file system data store. Initiated and chaired the Programming Standards Task Force, creating standards for common design patterns, exception management and online documentation. Initiated and led the Process Improvement team. Wrote code generation wizards, a hyperlinked help system (for 3270 terminals, before there was a Web), file analysis tools and many other developer and user tools. Solely responsible for the support and enhancement of multi-million-LOC data access engine used by all applications. Regularly processing 30MM+ records at a time. Led project teams and mentored other developers in reusable, structured and object-oriented techniques. Led the transition from development in assembler to C. Conducted training, wrote all C functions and macros for compatibility with legacy assembler systems.
Innovative Business Solutions, consultant	3/1990–5/1990	Denver, CO
Wrote asset management system for petroleum industry clients.
Martin Marietta Data Systems, consultant	7/1989–3/1990	Englewood, CO
Wrote accounting and internal billing applications. Wrote development and testing wizards. Refactored legacy systems to reduce costs of job execution.
Wiland Services, consultant	7/1988–7/1989	Boulder, CO
Wrote a flexible report definition and execution engine – saved 1000s of hours of application programming. Wrote user query/reporting engine regularly processing 30MM+ records.
MCI Telecommunications, computer operator, production specialist	3/1986–7/1988	Denver, CO
Rewrote reporting system to streamline distribution, saving 500 hours/year. Streamlined the Bell Billing interface system, reducing daily run cycle from 28 to 7 hours. Wrote user query tools – reduced ad-hoc programming requests; improved user efficiency and satisfaction. Wrote programs to automate maintenance processes.

Additional professional activities

Software Solutions, Inc.

Consult part-time on advanced research projects proposed for government grants from the NSF, DoD and others. Working on data-mining, subject matter expert and Semantic Web projects.

Research Assistant to Jeff Zhuk

Jeff Zhuk is chief architect for IQLabs, Inc., president and founder of Internet Technology School, Inc., author of 13 publications and expert in many computer fields, holding 10 patents.

Wrote browser application to transform XTM Topic Maps into various SVG representations. XSLT parses topic map, instantiates and calls a Java class to determine spatial positioning for topics, associations, occurrences and the edges that connect them. SVG event handling allows navigation between topics and to other Web pages. Wrote mining/parse tools in Rebol to author Topic Maps from non-structured text documents. Studied OpenCyc, RSS, RDF and other Semantic Web technologies.

Access/Ability, instructor

Taught Unix administration/shell programming through the Community College of Aurora.

Technologies

XML, XSL(XSLT), XSD, SVG, SMIL, RDF, XTM, Xforms

HTML, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript/ECMA Script, AJAX

PHP, ASP, VBScript, .NET, VB6, VB.NET, C#

XMLRPC, SOAP

PostgreSQL, SQL Server 2000, DB2, DTS, Sybase

XUL/Firefox/Mozilla, SharePoint

Visual Studio.NET/6/InterDev, Eclipse, Visual SourceSafe, Crystal Reports

Apache, IIS 4.0 – 5.0, ADO, COM+, COM, MTS, MSMQ

MS Access 2000, MS Office/Outlook

HTML Help Workshop, SmartDocument

Xselerator, XMLSpy, Facets, Embarcadero

Windows XP/2K/NT4/98/95, DOS

C, Java, Rebol, OpenCyc, SQL, T-SQL

Linux, MVS/XA, Vax, Unix, CICS, VSAM

Assembler, Cobol, Fortran, Easytrieve+, SAS

REXX, CLIST, JCL, ISPF, TSO, SGML, DTL

Education

• Metropolitan State College Denver, CO, Computer Information and Management Science