Profile

Expertise

• Hands-on team leadership of information system development projects.
• Architecture and development of enterprise information systems.
• Server-side scalability analysis and tuning.
• Technology training.

Summary of Experience

Technical Team Leadership. Experience as chief architect and technical team lead in a variety of development projects.

Information System Development. Experience in all phases of the information system development lifecycle: analysis, architecture, construction, deployment, and maintenance. Experience in building all tiers of enterprise applications: web-based UI, application server business logic, and database schema and procedures. Successful design, development, and deployment of systems in organizations of up to several thousand users.

Performance and Scalability. Experience in deploying and tuning large-scale benchmarks, including a TPC-C benchmark for the Sybase SQL Server, and a TPC-W benchmark for the Borland Enterprise Server. Delivered competitive performance statistics to the benchmark sponsors for use as marketing collateral.

Technology Instruction. Strong background in technology instruction in industry and academia: providing IT professionals with an in-depth, solution-oriented knowledge of software systems and technologies.

Services

Over the past 20 years, clients have used my services to design and build information systems in a variety of application areas, among them, insurance, flight scheduling, product sales and customer registration, internet marketing, and IT asset management.

Clients also like to use my deep knowledge of systems, especially in the areas of performance, scalability, and replication, for special services. Examples of these special projects are the analysis of the performance of Borland's J2EE platform, and the design and implementation of an update-anywhere replicated database for Siemens.

In my 25-year software career, I have become proficient in a variety of platforms, languages, systems, and tools. My primary development platform is Java. I also have substantial experience in .NET and C#. Of course, I use Javascript for browser UI programming, and various relational databases, notably, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL for persistence.

But where you will find the most value in my services is in the depth of systems knowledge, an analytic problem solving sensibility, a passion for clean designs, and a hands-on approach to project leadership.

Work History

Clients include:

• PS'Soft, San Mateo, CA, and Sophia Antipolis, France.
  Senior Architect. Led a team of 5 developers to architect and prototype the next generation of PS'Soft's IT asset management services based on .NET and C#. Worked closely with product management to define high-level requirements. Worked hands-on with the development team to lead the evaluation, selection, and prototyping of appropriate technologies to address general product requirements, among them: workflow, event processing, scripting, reporting, support for user-defined custom properties and custom entities, UI customization, multi-lingual support, rights management, and access through web services. Led the combined development and product management team to define and prototype the domain model for a new generation of IT asset management services. Led the development of an object-relational mapping framework capable of managing custom entities and custom properties, and the development of a web services framework based on WCF (Windows Communications Foundation) to expose IT asset management functions through web services. Put in place an agile development process, including iterative and incremental development in short 2-week cycles, group estimation, unit testing, continuous integration, and regular retrospectives.
• MyBuys Inc., Redwood Shores, CA.
  Chief Architect of MyBuys' on-demand preference-based marketing application server. Technical lead of a team of 6 developers. Spearheaded the development of a web-based system for capturing consumer preferences, matching preferences to retailer inventories, and providing shopping alerts to consumers through email and RSS. Architected the system based on lightweight open-source Java technologies including Spring, Hibernate, Struts, and Velocity. Programmed significant parts of the system, including the base architectural infrastructure, and the server-side preference capture and preference matching functions.
• Borland Software Corporation, San Mateo, CA.
  Benchmarked the Borland Enterprise Server: Borland's J2EE platform. Implemented the TPC-W benchmark by using Java Servlets and EJBs. Deployed and tuned the benchmark on the Sun Solaris platform by using Oracle. Demonstrated a throughput of hundreds of web interactions per second, with sub-second average response time, for thousands of concurrent web users.
• Visigenic Software, Inc. [Later acquired by Borland], San Mateo, CA.
  Co-developed and supported the release of VisiChannel for ODBC, Visigenic's JDBC driver for ODBC.
• MarketFirst, Inc., Mountain View, CA.
  Produced COM and CORBA APIs to Marketfirst's core web-marketing services. Created a web-based user interface for authoring electronic marketing documents and surveys, by using Java Servlets, JSPs, and JavaScript.
• Siemens Information and Communication Networks, Santa Clara, CA.
  Consultant. Designed, implemented, and deployed an update-anywhere data replication scheme, based on the Sybase Replication Server, for the Siemens Modification Request Tracking System, a global software life cycle information system, with database replicas in California and Germany.
• Pacific A&M, San Bruno, CA.
  Led the development team of the Pacific A&M Information System, an insurance administration, marketing, and accounts receivable system. Designed, implemented, and deployed the system by using the INGRES RDBMS.
• Digital Equipment Corporation, Palo Alto, CA.
  Sybase on-site project lead for the symmetric multiprocessing port of the Sybase SQL Server to the DEC Alpha OSF/1 UNIX operating system. Led the porting effort. Developed execution analysis tools to identify and fix race conditions unique to the Alpha 64-bit SMP architecture. Analyzed the performance of the Sybase SQL Server on this platform by using TPC benchmarks.
• Sybase, Emeryville, CA.
  Client-site training instructor. Provided on-site training to Sybase customers throughout the US on core Sybase skills: concepts and facilities, application programming, system administration, and performance and tuning.
• Sun Microsystems, Milpitas, CA.
  Sybase instructor. Trained Sun's technical staff in the Sybase RDBMS.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. Member, Technical Staff, 1985 - 1987.
Co-designed the Network Software Environment, an integrated development platform for configuration management, version control, coordinated development, and release management.

INGRES Corp. Member, Technical Staff, 1983 - 1985.
Designed and implemented B-trees, a dynamic storage structure for tables and indexes in the relational database management system INGRES.

University of California, Berkeley. Lecturer, Computer Science Division, 1979 - 1983.

University of California, San Francisco. Assistant Professor, 1976 - 1982.
Research. Studied the representation and processing of time in databases. Proposed a basis for the management of historical data. Teaching. Taught graduate and undergraduate computer science courses. Supervised Master's and Ph.D. students.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley (1977).
M.S. and B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, M.I.T. (1972).

Publications

• Bolour, A., Notes on the Eclipse Plug-in Architecture, Eclipse Corner Article, eclipse.org (July 2003).
• Bolour, A., Bitton, M., and Chen R., Multi-site concurrency control with the Sybase replication server, SQL Forum, Vol. 3, No. 4 (July/August 1994), pp. 17 - 22. [Revised and greatly expanded in Dynamic Primary Site Migration: An Approach to Update Conflict Avoidance in Replicated Databases, Bolour Computing (2003).]
• Bolour, A., Anderson, T.L., Dekeyser, L.J., and Wong H.K.T., The role of time in information processing: A survey, ACM SIGMOD Record, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Apr. 1982); also appeared in ACM SIGART Newsletter (Apr. 1982). Dekeyser, L.J., and Bolour, A., On the modeling of time in clinical database applications, Proceedings of the fifth Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, (Nov. 1981).
• Bolour, A., and Dekeyser, L.J., Abstractions in temporal information, Information Systems, Vol. 8, No. 1, (1983), pp. 41 - 49.
• Bolour, A., Optimal retrieval algorithms for small region queries, SIAM Journal on Computing, Vol. 10, No. 4, (Nov. 1981), pp. 721 - 741.
• Bolour, A., Techniques of physical design, (invited paper), Proceedings of the Infotech State of the Art Conference on Data Design, London, (Sept. 1979).
• Bolour, A., Optimality properties of multiple-key hashing functions, Journal of the ACM, (Apr. 1979), pp. 196 - 210.

Other