Shawn Vincent

svincent@svincent.com

home: 519-744-4474     cell: 226-338-2480

Systems analyst and software developer with over 11 years experience designing and developing commercial software. Extensive expertise developing frameworks, compilers, user interfaces and web applications. Solid experience, skills and commitment to build real world software.

Skilled at balancing business requirements, branding, graphic design, user experience and technical feasibility. Thrives in ongoing learning environment and rapidly acquires new skills. Confident public speaker and leader. Values teamwork for creative problem solving. Self motivated and takes pride in completing solid, stable solutions under budget.

Real world experience herding projects through their entire life cycle: from conception, through and beyond deployment.

Experience Highlights: systems analysis, object design, user interface design, cross browser website design, programming language design, requirements gathering, project management, web positioning

Programming Languages: Java (J2EE / J2SE), C#, C, C++, Smalltalk, Prolog, Scheme

Web languages: (X)HTML, DHTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, XSL / XSLT, JSP, ASP

Databases: JDBC, Hibernate, EJB, SQL, Oracle

Operating Systems: Mac OS, MS Windows, Linux

Additional Technologies: Emacs, Eclipse, Omniture, SOAP, REST, RMI, XQuery, Servlets

Citizenship: Dual US / Canadian

Systems Analyst: MedHunters.com (Thestral project), Kitchener ON

Nov 2002 - Present

Built a world class health care job board using Java and the proprietary Exalt framework. The earlier version, JSP MedHunters, suffered from declining numbers. Replacing JSP MedHunters with Thestral MedHunters was a huge success, reversing the trend and doubling traffic and job application volumes. The live infrastructure was incrementally replaced using a small team. No sub-project took more than five months to complete successfully.

Responsible for the entire project life cycle: business process analysis, project management, requirements gathering, prototyping, user experience testing, design, implementation, data migration, deployment, testing, monitoring, traffic analysis, documentation, ongoing support and improvements.

Acted as key technical advisor to business owners, and as technical representative for the company during the sale of MedHunters.com. Maintained direct involvement with shareholders and end users throughout entire project.

Developed a powerful, easy to use, cross browser DHTML website. Implemented an XML transformation pipeline, allowing high level page specifications to be rendered at runtime into cross-browser DHTML. The interface provides excellent usability, while incorporating intelligent “white hat” web positioning strategies. This doubled incoming traffic and job application volumes.

Designed and wrote an exciting cutting edge resume database and monthly reports for client employers. Clients and sales staff loved these services, resulting in increased sales.

Responsible for developing back end systems including sales force management software, reports, data browsers and editors. This gave staff easy access to critical business data, improving sales efficiency and streamlining work flow.

Wrote a content management system including a document markup language, associated tools and an image management system. This allowed thousands of articles and images to be managed for the website.

Developed robust infrastructure for maintaining the site: process management, monitoring, and logging and log analysis.

Designed and built a sophisticated geographic taxonomy and geocoding mechanism. Incorporated data from publicly available and licensed geographic data sources.

Senior Consultant: MedHunters.com (JSP project), Kitchener ON

August 1999 - October 1999

Replaced an aging Python health care job board that had essentially zero traffic and conversions with a new system written in JSP. The new system generated enough traffic to support a viable business.

Responsible for all phases of project development, as with the Thestral project.

Senior Software Architect: Exalt Inc., Kitchener ON

September 1996 - Present (2-four month work terms, full time subsequently)

Instrumental in the research and development of a next generation programming framework for the rapid development of sophisticated real world applications. Developed a Java-like language and associated framework that has an XML-based type system and powerful data transformation facilities. The Exalt framework makes sophisticated dynamic web applications easy to write. The Exalt framework proved itself while developing MedHunters. This complex web application was developed easily and deployed in five months.

Developed a programming framework to write live, multi-view editors for complex, hierarchical data structures.

Participated in consulting work for MedHunters.com.

Wrote and defended Canadian Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit proposals.

Designed and built an XQuery compiler. Provided specification feedback to the XQuery Working Group.

Developed a high speed XSLT compiler. This implementation passed public conformance suites, plus included language extensions such as laziness and true functions.

Designed and built a JSP implementation that generated guaranteed valid HTML output. Contributed to the JSP Working Group to resolve specification issues.

Wrote a compiler for an object oriented superset of Visual Basic with built in O/R mapping support.

Designed and built an object database system with inverted word list index support.

Built frameworks for generating HTML mail that can be read on most popular email clients.

Developed many compilers, interpreters, and preprocessors for various prototypes of the above projects.

Software Architect: Comdisco, Rosemont IL

September 1994 - April 1996 (3-four month work terms)

Worked in a team to develop a three tiered Smalltalk application framework for business applications. Was directly responsible for designing and building most of the framework including the O/R mapping subsystem.

Provided consulting services to develop a Visual Basic lease termination application for Pennzoil.

Software Developer: SHL Systemhouse, Waterloo ON

May 1993 - April 1994 (2-four month work terms)

Wrote C code for a point of sale system for PepsiCo's Taco Bell and KFC restaurant chains.

Worked on the design, implementation and documentation of a screen definition language, which sped project development.

University of Waterloo

September 1993 - October 1998

Bachelor of Mathematics, Honors Computer Science (with Distinction)

Educational Awards

Governor General's Award

Canada Scholar

Personal Software Projects

HonestJourney.com: Wrote a sophisticated, easy to use Java forum application. Migrated to PHP based forum upon switching hosting providers, where Java was not supported.

Cloptus: Publicly available Java API for processing command line arguments.

OddTruth: Developed for HonestJourney.com, a very lightweight template language for generating HTML from Java.

Moksa: Toy Prolog environment. Moksa compiles Prolog code to Java byte code, using a rudimentary WAM.