E-mail: kelly@acoin.com
Updated: August 1, 2001
OBJECTIVE:
To apply my knowledge of computer science and business to useful projects in software development, documentation, training or related work. I have an extremely high interest in C++ and Internet programming. I am currently seeking an opportunity with a small startup.
SUMMARY:
I am a programmer with six years of real, in depth, experience with C++ since 1991. I have been working as a technical writer and manager since 1995, although I eventually intend to go back to programming and management. I co-founded ViewSoft, a software development tools company, in 1991. ViewSoft was acquired by Citrix in a friendly acquisition in July 1999. These experiences have provided the opportunity to improve as a programmer as well as broadening my interests and abilities in many other areas.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW:
Citrix Systems, Inc. 7/99 - 8/01
ViewSoft, Inc. 10/97 - 7/99
Utah Software Consultants, Inc. 12/95 - 10/97
ViewSoft, Inc. 4/91 - 12/95
Automated Archives 12/89 - 6/91
Brigham Young University 9/85 - 6/91
English Teacher 6/87 - 9/87
Data Entry 9/86 - 4/87
BYU Law Library Desk Clerk 9/85 - 9/86
LDS Mission 1/84 - 8/85
West Vigo High School 9/79 - 5/82
Planting Pineapple 6/81 - 8/81
STRONG POINTS:
WEAK POINTS:
TECHNICAL BACKGROUND:
Languages: C++ , C , assembler , perl , Java, HTML , Miscellaneous I am familiar with many user applications, such as MS Office, Lotus Office, FrameMaker, Quadralay and WordPerfect and learn new ones quickly. I also have experience with many different development tools including Track Record, Source Safe and many different compilers.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
Citrix Systems, Inc. 1/2001 - 8/2001 Position: Senior Programmer. Draper, UT
After the project was transferred to Florida, I was transferred into the engineering team at Citrix. I redesigned and reimplemented the user interface for one of the utility projects supporting MetaFrame.
Citrix Systems, Inc. 7/99 - 1/2001 Position: Senior Technical Writer. Draper, UT
Upon being acquired by Citrix, I continued the documentation work that I had done at ViewSoft. I passed the training and several other work areas off to others to focus on the documentation. I continued technically supervising a team of 3 other technical writers in a complex and ever changing environment. Ultimately, the project was moved to Florida. I was temporarily assigned to the test team.
ViewSoft, Inc. 10/97 - 7/99 Position: Documentation Manager. Provo, UT
I was hired again by ViewSoft to head up the documentation effort. The documentation process at ViewSoft is highly technical. Having a senior level programmer direct the effort was judged to be necessary to the success of the documentation program. I also directed the training efforts as well as doing most of the training and assisted in several other areas of the business.
Utah Software Consultants, Inc. 12/95 - 10/97 - Position: President. Provo, UT
As founder and president of Utah Software Consultants, I worked on several programming and documentation projects. Among these was a documentation project for ViewSoft, Inc. This project involved the creation of Application Notes documenting how to achieve specific tasks using the ViewSoft Internet development platform. Another major accomplishment was developing and teaching a training course on the subject of ViewSoft Internet. As ViewSoft's official training company, Utah Software Consultants delivered all of ViewSoft's training requirements. Utah Software Consultants also developed the American Coin web site. Several minor contracts were fulfilled for other clients as well, but I focused most of my efforts on ViewSoft related projects.
ViewSoft, Inc. 4/91 - 12/95 Position: Senior Programmer Provo, UT
I co-founded ViewSoft in 1991 with David Mitchell and Thomas McNeil. The experience of founding a company has broadened my horizons in numerous directions. At ViewSoft, we developed a C++ programmer tool called UTAH for Windows. This product is generally regarded as having the best architecture of any program in its class by those who have evaluated it. The basic architecture of the program still exists in Citrix' product line. Its primary strength was in building user interfaces (both for the Internet using Java and standalone with MFC) without writing user interface code. I was principally responsible for all low level data structures in UTAH the first three years at ViewSoft. I also created a significant number of GUIs for our builder program. Since the builder was built with itself, this provided a rich testing environment. I also wrote most of the code generation portions of the program. Many other miscellaneous programming tasks were assigned to me as well. I have written large amounts of documentation.
In addition to programming, I now have a good understanding of the legal aspects of software protection and have done copyright, trademark and patent work. I have done the vast majority of training at ViewSoft and was solely responsible for developing their training course. In fact, I was their primary training resource until late 1999. I was also responsible for a lot of the internal training necessary to get new employees up to speed on the product. I did a fair amount of testing, and am familiar with good testing procedures. For a time, I was responsible for tracking and assigning all bugs in the program. I developed a program used in partially internationalizing UTAH's builder including providing automatic translation of strings in the interface to Japanese. I have done a great deal of technical support, and completely understand the architecture of the UTAH program. I was primarily responsible for getting ViewSoft attached to the Internet. During most of this time, I was also a member of the board of directors. This allowed me to learn a lot about the technical details of setting up and running a small business. I also did custom programming work for various ViewSoft customers. I attended trade shows, and was a primary presenter much of the time. My basic job at ViewSoft was to do anything that the company required which did not fit neatly into someone else's job description.
Automated Archives 12/89 - 6/91 Position: Computer Programmer. Orem, UT
Designed, tested, implemented, and supported software. At Automated
Archives, we developed one of the first CD-ROM based text indexing and
retrieval applications. One of our largest challenges was that we had to
sell CD-ROM drives to each customer before they could use our product because
almost nobody had one then. While there are many such applications now,
it was quite exciting at the time. This work was done in ANSI C; I have
over 4 years of experience in C prior to my C++ experience.
My responsibilities included:
I started out at BYU as an electrical engineering student. After a year of chasing electrons and not creating a single useful device, I decided against taking partial differential equations. During this time, I took a C programming class, and I was hooked. I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in computer science in 1989 with a 3.3 GPA, having taken the hardest classes they would let me take. I worked for BYU during this time as a teacher's assistant. I assisted the computer architecture class, data structures, pattern recognition and computer vision. I also wrote many libraries of code that were used in research and for class work. Of course, I wrote a truckload of programs at BYU. In 1989 I became a graduate student of computer science at Brigham Young University. While there, I worked on various image processing and pattern recognition techniques, but specialized in character recognition algorithms. My thesis was, "Character Recognition in the Context of Forms." While it was never completed, a paper was published disclosing the major ideas. A commercial product has since been developed that paralleled many of my ideas, although I was in no way connected to them. Although I worked diligently on my Thesis for four years, I had chosen to bite of more than could be chewed effectively with the tools available to me. I completed all class work necessary to obtain a MS less one programming assignment. Founding ViewSoft mercifully put the final nail in my academic career or I would probably still be there. I learned a lot about optimizing projects from this failure. I participated in BYU's internal research conference three years running. Each year with a different project. I feel a great debt to BYU, because I have seen the code written by many self-taught programmers. Thankfully, I am able to write code that is worthy of a computer scientist.
English Teacher 6/87 - 9/87 Taipei, Taiwan
One summer, my wife and I decided to have a little adventure. We went to Taiwan and taught English as a second language. I have always had a knack for teaching, and this experience helped to sharpen my skills even further. I also worked as a technical proof reader, correcting some of those horrid translations that come out of the orient. My students ranged from little children to employees of a company building fax machines. Since I had never seen one before, it took quite a bit of explaining to figure out what the heck they were doing.
For a period, I worked for BYU's comprehensive clinic. My primary responsibility was inputting test scores into an Apple II computer. I also did a little BASIC programming, which was quite fun.
BYU Law Library Desk Clerk 9/85 - 9/86
My first real exposure to the law came from working as a front desk clerk in BYU's law library. I spent a lot of time listening to the instructional tapes. I also got some familiarity with VMS, and wrote programs to do some trivial IS work the library required. Mostly, I just checked books out and kept the law students happy.
I participated as a religious volunteer in a year and a half long program primarily in Brazil. Responsibilities included training new missionaries, and teaching. I speak fluent non-technical Portuguese, and have mid-level conversational abilities in Spanish. I also have a fairly good understanding of the Brazilian culture.
West Vigo High School 9/79 - 5/82
I went to high school in Terre Haute, Indiana. High school was mostly boring. I graduated with a 3.85 GPA, and finished in the top ten percent of my class. I took the first computer class ever taught at the school and inevitably we ended up teaching the teacher.
Planting Pineapple 6/81 - 8/81
The highlight of my high school years was a summer spent in Hawaii with Youth Developmental Enterprises picking and planting pineapples. It was there that I learned the value of working hard. Several times, I planted 10,000 pineapples in a single day. This is a feat roughly equivalent to running two back to back marathons. It was fun to eat 7000 calories a day and not gain any weight.
Miscellaneous Jobs 1/77 - 1/84
During the course of high school, I had several miscellaneous jobs. I worked on farms, sold ice cream, cleaned cars, did post fire clean up and worked several custodial jobs. Not that any of this really matters, except that I have been working consistently since I was 16.
Computer Language Experience:
C++ is my most natural environment. While some people say I did object-oriented before object-oriented was cool, I say C++ isn't yet object-oriented enough, and to prove it helped write a library at ViewSoft to improve C++ at the language level. We added an extensible full blown runtime meta-data database, full dynamic binding (to do things by name like Smalltalk), a data changed callback mechanism called probes that externalizes dependencies from objects and a generic factory method for creating objects by name. You can't add this kind of functionality to a language without understanding it in depth. I wrote most of the data structures myself as there weren't as many nice C++ class libraries around in those days. I have a working knowledge of international character sets. I've programmed in C++ nearly exclusively since 1991.
In 1985, I took my first C programming class. It was nearly a religious experience and contributed strongly to changing majors. All of my work at Automated Archives, as well as nearly all of that done at BYU was done in C. C is a sound language that I understand very well. While I prefer the enhancements of C++, C is a natural environment for me.
Assembler Programming Experience
I did most of my time in assembly at school. I can dig through it, but it wouldn't be my first choice. In practice I've found that better algorithms usually do more for the speed of a program than assembly language. That said, I do understand how the compiler turns code into assembly, and know how to write code the compiler will treat kindly. I understand the low level issues of overflow, underflow and 2's complement arithmetic, etc. This type of bit-twiddling is invaluable and unavoidable in writing image processing software.
I would consider myself an intermediate expert at HTML. I have good knowledge of the tools used to automate the HTML production process.
I've heard of Perl, and know all the tools and languages it is based on. I would like to learn more. UNIX Shell Programming Experience I have used the csh in school, and feel quite confident that I can bend it to my will, if necessary. I also feel that it's usually avoidable with the other tools out there.
I know enough Java to be dangerous. The basic language itself is no problem, but I don't have a lot of familiarity with the libraries. I know enough about Java to want to avoid it in most cases.
Miscellaneous Language Experience
I have written programs in APL, LISP, Prolog, PostScript, forth, Pascal, BASIC and several flavors of assembly. While I would not characterize myself as an expert at any of these languages, I feel that I can learn any language required although it always takes a few months to reach a reasonable level of competence.
Hardware Platforms I also have some limited experience programming Transputers, Apple 8-bit, Macintosh computers, unix, NeXTStep, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, VMS, DOS, Windows, Windows 95 and Windows NT.
Hobbies
See my home page.
Provo
Provo is the home of Brigham Young University, Novell and ViewSoft. The Salt Lake City airport is 50 miles north on I-15. It is a beautiful place to live and to visit.
References
References are available on request.
Legal Notice
This Resume Copyright(C) 1995-1996 by Kelly Anderson. It may not be distributed by others without express permission from the author. This is especially true for employment agencies.