Past and Present Work

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Intro

The following are some of the job descriptions and background of the projects I have worked/am working on. Due to the nature of company confidentiality and proprietary work - Please do not ask me to tell you about [anything] other than the details listed below. I will ignore those requests.

Enjoy!

Contracting

Sprinkled in the mist of between projects listed below are some contracting work. I mostly build the */Apache/MySQL/PHP system on the BSD/Linux/*nix platform and go from there. I also do quite a few application and services programming. Most of my clients want to use as low as possible run-time cost solutions. Some of the small tools and submissions I have written are available on my Open Source projects page.

My background in video game programming shows off a lot of real-time development experience. Online programming and telecommunication experience provides me with a wealth knowledge on networking and connectivity solutions in real-world situations.

Luxoflux Studio

A short run stint, from fall of 2008 to spring of 2009, at Luxoflux Studios for Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen, the video game. This was a one year project development cycle, so I knew there was going to be nothing but crunch work.

And what can I say, I like Transformers enough to give it a chance. I was given the task of working on the networking side of the game. Gameplay features, networking stability and Xbox Live connectivity is where most of my work concentrated on. I did not learn anything new when it came to software engineering, but I did learn more about how [ to / NOT to ] run a studio. Interesting to see how different studios/publishers do business.

Valuable lessons learned. The studio has been closed by the publisher right after the project was completed when no new projects were lined up/available for the studio to take on.

Midway Games

For almost seven full years, 2001 to 2007, I was at Midway Games, makers of your favorite arcade titles such as: NBA Jams, NFL Blitz and all of those Rush driving games. They also distributed those timeless classics such as: Galaga and Defender in the United States market.

I started working there on a "table top" product called the TouchMaster. You see these and many copy-cats on the bar tops of your favorite watering holes.

But the company all of the sudden decided to axe all coin-op projects. And, your's truly was blessed to become part of the world famous Mortal Kombat family. I have learned A LOT about developing video games while working on these projects. Many different discipline and skills are needed to develop, complete and bring the products to market.

This was a dream job. But alas, all good things must come to an end.

The primary reason I left Midway Games was part office politics and part corporate shenanigans. Long story short, the video game industry is notoriously known for having "crunch". But the company decided to short change the bonus and even reneged on them. This burned up/out a lot of people, good people. And, as of this update, Midway Games has gone under bankruptcy, went out of business and sold off in bit and pieces.

Motorola

From June of 1998 to the end of the year 2000, I worked for Motorola's Global Telecommunication Solutions Sector. The project was on the next generation of Base Station Controllers (BSC) for the future of cellular communications and data transmission.

The basic premise of the project is simple: redundant systems for high-availability performance.

The areas covered on this project is vast. They include working on: real time operating systems (VxWorks was the last known OS used while in the past - Chorus and Lynx were also implemented); PowerPC industrial boards; networking infrastructures including source version control, web servers, large scale data storage, data base and multi-user servers (on the Windows NT and Sun Solaris platforms); and third tier user application development.

I once suggested that we use the existing BSD or one of the many linux derivatives for the basic router-like design the project was heading towards; and to also use de-centralized servers for providing redundant database services. But, this is were I learned how/why large old corporations move very slow. It seemed that they wanted a company, contractor, or whoever to "pass the buck" to instead of taking the reigns and leading the charge to innovated solutions.

Digital Equipment Corporation

At 1997, I interned for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) working on a Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis technology product called DECtalk.

Experience during this project included developing build processes, designing new features, creating automated development tools for tuning and testing quality control systems and working through a product release cycle.

The DECtalk team consisted of only 10 people. This gave me an opportunity to work on a lot of the different areas of the project. Core development work included:

Researching near natural sounding voice speech
Highly intelligible voice production
Multi-language support
Multi-platform support
Automatic testing application tools
Automatic speech quality adjustment tools
Proprietary applications

My most memorable moment, a utility I wrote from scratch, the automatic speech quality adjustment tool, was considered as a release candidate for a stand alone application.

The skills and experience I have learned from that internship was worth more to me then all of my computer science programming classes I had taken in college combined. I would highly recommend anyone who is in college to take an internship or a CO-OP position whenever possible. It is definitely worth the extra semesters.

University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign

Also during college, I worked for the University of Illinois's Computing Services Office. Specifically, the Engineering Workstation Lab (EWS).

In addition to assisting users on the College of Engineering Workstation computers, software and hardware support were also part of the responsibilities for the position. These included: configuring, maintaining and trouble-shooting the systems over seven labs and about 270 networked UNIX workstations, including:

Sun SPARCstation 20/71,
IBM RS6000,
HP/Apollo HP-UX models 715/50 715/75 and 715/80

And, my later years at EWS, I have been given the opportunity of managing one of the labs that came with additional responsibilities, including:

Maintenance of the lab room themselves
Checking on attendance and the performance of the lab assistants
Holding performance and merit reviews
And providing suggestions and reports on improving the lab's status and usability for the engineer's needs

Jaleco

Through out my high school years, I got my foot in the video game world with a company called - Jaleco USA. For almost 4 years, I have been given opportunities ranging from running the warehouse department as manager, working as an electrical technician, and even got the chance to be part of marketing for their consumer electronic video game product line.

They have been successful in the past with their commercial and consumer products. Some of Jaleco's popular commercial arcade games included:

Cisco Heat
Grand Pre Star
F-1 Super Battle
Arm Champs
B.O.T.S.S.
and more

Jaleco made it big with their consumer line up of baseball games. The following titles were available on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, and NES GameBoy System:

(Super) Bases Loaded I, II, III and IV
Maniac Mansion
CyberBall
Rampart
Earth Defense Force
(Super) Goal
Q-Bert
Word-Zap
and more

They were featured in Replay Magazine (October 1994), click HERE to see some of the people I have worked with (back in the day).

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