Mike Jones

Seattle, WA

currently: Here to network

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Answers from Mike

How would you describe your dream job in 10 words or less?

Empowering, interesting, engaging, enabling, fun, technically risky, financially stable. That's probably enough. I have friends that have side projects or code pet programs just to stay interested. I'd rather have a job that interests me. I'm used to companies with something of a startup mentality that demanded resourceful, successful bright people who can learn fast and take the risks necessary to win.

I'm pretty easy to please. I want a job that enables me to win. I like software development with a strong domain basis so I have to figure out the underlying assumptions and business processes to write good code.

There's work-life balance, but I think I do best in a situation that requires a burn every now and again. I like the rush of working hard on something I believe in, but like to take time off during the down times and just put it all aside. I'm also looking for a good group of people to work with that I can trust to take a meritocratic view on their life at work.... read more

Posted @ 06:07PM, July 15, 2008 by Mike Jones | Permalink
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Work history

Amazon.Com September 2008 to the present
Software Engineer

How would you describe your time at Amazon.Com?

Java development at Amazon. What more could one want?
Overstock.com August 2007 to August 2008
Sr Software Developer

tags: • • • • • • • • •

How would you describe your time at Overstock.com?

Overstock has a bright vibrant development community developing massively scalable applications. Most of my effort has been the development of internal SOA webservices, data integration web services and batch jobs. I've also been involved with a couple of lightweight web applications for internal use. I've done a lot of good and learned quite a bit.

My primary reservations have largely been my isolation from the really cool stuff. I was originally hired and placed in a position to temporarily replace an engineer that was leaving and happened to be working closely with a business group in relative isolation from the rest of development. I've had a number of opportunities to fill in and help with other projects and those experiences have been awesome. At this point, I think I made myself a little too necessary and see little opportunity for lateral transfer and initial promises have been forgotten.

I could voice my concerns and I'm still working to make my mark if only to do so. I think, however, that my relative boredom is a sign that this engineer should take a closer look into finding his place in Silicon Valley.... read more
PrimeRevenue October 2005 to August 2007
Sr Software Engineer

tags: • • • • • • • •

How would you describe your time at PrimeRevenue?

PrimeRevenue's business model is centered on automating supply chain financing. Other terms used in the area (with subtle distinctions) are asset based lending and factoring. Basically, it's the process of making loans on invoices. They had an existing product to assist loans against a company's payables (called AP) which was starting to show its limitations. I was brought on to assist development of a new product being developed jointly under contract with a financial institution to assist lending on a company's receivable invoices (called ABL). The goal was to design ABL to fulfill contract requirements and eventually replace the AP product.

I came on as a contractor, but had already worked for the Project Manager and Development VP at Metiom and knew a number of the other existing staff. They were at a regrouping point where some initial framework and CRUD screens had been completed, but were going to go through the 120 dense pages of specifications and documentation to develop use cases, functional requirements and a project plan for the following 9-10 months.

Initially, the project had two other contractors and nine FTE developers. Over the project those numbers stayed approximately the same with the addition of an offshore group to help with bugs. Development was structured around Coad's FDD Agile processes with various other Agile techniques (pairing, scrum sessions, feature spikes) rolled in on an ad hoc bases as needed.

My role in the development was as the primary developer of the accounting and document life-cycle areas. During ABL's development, I started on some early financial processing since I had some experience in ERP and business accounting. Looking at our downstream requirements it seemed obvious that we needed a finer grained transaction system abstracted from simple business document models so I designed a lightweight accounting engine along with some design discussions with my boss, Jeremy, the project manager. The accounting engine was modeled on self & parent updating nested records in a general ledger's chart of accounts. After that, I was assigned almost all the document and accounting features except for a few joint efforts to establish mindshare across the team. Even so, I don't feel like I was a lone wolf coder during the development as there was a lot of interdependency and there were daily design scrums since these coupled components were being developed from scratch in parallel.

I was also the primary developer on many of the different risk and lending metrics including the core metric called the borrowing base which summarized all other risk metrics and calculations as a single maximum value that a client could borrow at any given time based on their assets.

Other development efforts I played a role in included concurrency management across the cluster which I based on techniques used in the Quartz framework, various Form and Wizard controllers and CRUD screens using JSP tag files and libraries and JSTL EL, schema design and hibernate mappings, Java 5 annotation based data validation, hibernate event based entity audit framework, user roles and permissions, user task and workflows, and reporting.

Following the initial delivery of the completed ABL version there were a number of layoffs and subsequent attrition. I've stayed on to help get the system live and implemented change requests, bug fixes, and integration tasks. The production version is now live and final scheduled change requests are expected to be delivered in two weeks.

Architectural and Technical Summary
ABL is a Spring / Spring MVC application with Hibernate for the persistence layer. Deployment was against Tomcat on RedHat with Oracle 9i. The Spring MVC leveraged JSPs, JSP tag libraries & tag files with JSTL EL, CSS, DHTML, and a small amount of Ajax for breadcrumb management at the front end. The integration communication layer between separate internal systems and external systems used a combination of JMS as well as XML, delimited and fixed length flat file transport over a proprietary encrypted transport mechanism. Various other buzzworthy technologies include Xstream, Quartz, Cewolf & DisplayTag.

Most developers liked IntelliJ, but I switched back to Eclipse. Hibernate mappings were maintained by hand in hbm files and we used hbm2ddl for schema generation. Other development tools included JUnit, Ant, CVS, and JIRA for issue tracking.... read more
KnowledgeBlue February 2005 to November 2005
Lead Engineer / Architect

tags: • • • • • • •

How would you describe your time at KnowledgeBlue?

KnowledgeBlue was a commercial open source shop leveraging the Compiere ERP system. Over the years, KnowledgeBlue had developed several value added features and markets the combination as openBLUE. Since I left KnowledgeBlue, the user community has since forked Compiere so there is another version called ADempiere available. Versions compatible with a backend other than Oracle have also since been released.

When I first started, the previous primary technical staff had left and what remained was a cautionary tale of development processes. By the time I left, I had merged three separate versions of the 1700+ class system and created a central CVS, trained the local intern up to a competent Jr. Java Developer, helped establish an Asian Development group that could independently design and submit features as dedicated employees, moved testing off of live production platforms onto test boxes, established a standard development environment along with associated build tools and passed on months of reverse engineering knowledge to my replacement.

In addition to reworking the development processes, my efforts included: managing development; implementing customizations; remote, offsite and local installation & configuration of openBLUE and Oracle 10g; and administration/configuration of the Windows/Linux ASP center including migration from a data center in Texas to one in Utah.

Architectural and Technical Summary
Compiere was written by a long term SAP programmer and at the time was tightly couple with Oracle and used either stored procedures or SQLJ for much of the business logic. The front end is Swing with layout definitions stored in the database. There is also a web front end using JSP/JSTL and Servlets, but both the Swing and the online version use JBoss. During my work with Compiere, Oracle was required and we generally deployed on Oracle 10g.... read more
Metiom February 2001 to August 2001
Jr Software Developer

tags: • • • •

How would you describe your time at Metiom?

Metiom was my dot-com bomb. I was only there for about four to five months. When I started, the company had over 300 employees. I made it to the last 30. It was an e-marketplace solution with a similar business model to Ariba. My role was to assist the development of the message oriented middleware product that interfaced with outside systems and with their e-catalog product. Primary tasks were web based UI screens using XSL/XSLT, EDI to XML translation and JMS messenging.

Tools used included JProbe, WebGain Studio, BEA Weblogic Server, MS-SQL and Oracle 8i.... read more
CogniTech March 2000 to March 2005
Software Engineer / Scientist

tags: • • • • • • • •

How would you describe your time at CogniTech?

Overall, CogniTech is pretty difficult to describe. I spent a lot of time there, so it spans my career from intern to mid level software engineer. While I was there, it moved from a primarily commercial services oriented company to focusing on government research development contracts that afforded commercial reuse rights. Often, one of the postdoctoral staff would have a research component and I was used as a developer with some domain knowledge to work on much of the general development.

CogniTech was a small company that ranged from 3 to 12 developers over the time I was there. My roles within the company ranged from product concept development & RFP response to product design, implementation, reporting and contract negotiations. After the dot-com bomb, the best way for me to keep working was to make sure that CogniTech remained solvent. Over the years I was there, I definitely paid more than the required pound of flesh and wore just about every hat necessary.

I still do some odd side work with CogniTech. Sometimes to help out, and sometimes because having the occasional hobby job as a freelance rocket scientist does wonders for my egghead street cred.

Technologies Summary
An enumerated list of technologies used include: Java, JSPs, Servlets, Struts, Swing, SWT, Eclipse, Visual Age for Java, JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, JServ, GnuJSP, NetObjects Fusion, DreamWeaver, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, DB2 Everyplace, CORBA, JacORB, openORB, HLA, RMI, JMS, XML, XSL/XSLT, Cocoon, XUL, OS/2, Windows, RedHat, Debian, Gentoo & Linux Clusters.

CogniTech was primarily a Java shop, but other languages I used with various levels of experience include C/C++, FORTRAN, Python, PHP, Perl and Shell Scripting... read more
Gramco February 1999 to May 2000
Chemical Process Engineer
Western Analysis April 1996 to April 2000
Chemist

Education

University of Utah August 1993 to May 1999
Chemical Engineering

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