My career

My Career as a Data Engineer, Architect, Practitioner and Evangelist

I am a software engineer by trade and a data enthusiast by passion and practice.

Working hard to tame the elephant

Laying out a new highly scalable data architecture for Penton Media
Establishing at Penton, a “lab” culture and infrastructure to practice data management at scale
Deployment of Penton’s first Hadoop cluster for data processing with HDFS, YARN, HBase and Hive
Developed the “V1” Big Data strategy for EMC’s GRC platform utilizing Hadoop and Greenplum
Lead the development and release to market of IBM’s first in-memory data warehouse software
Built a SQL interface for IBM Informix and DB2 administration commands enabling partners to build their own applications
Helped several IBM customers with best practices around database clustering, replication, security and performance
Sharing my insights and experience through conference speaking engagements and publications
Recognition from peers, fellow technologists and the companies that I worked for – what I feel honored about and consider priceless

Director, Data Platform, Penton Media July 2013 to present

Tasked with building a new scalable data architecture and growing a data development team
Lead data engineering tasks for all data products
Interface with Product Management on data requirements
Build data models, prototypes
Work with Ops to define and implement infrastructure for data engineering
Lead research of technologies including the ever-evolving Hadoop Stack, NoSQL data stores and processing frameworks
Adopt and deploy Pentaho as a data integration and analytics platform atop the Hadoop stack
Other duties include employee management, contractor management and budgeting

Senior Product Manager, EMC June 2012 to present

Technical product manager for EMC’s GRC platform
Build and maintain Data Security roadmap for EMC GRC for On Prem and SaaS models
Develop “V1” Big Data strategy for for GRC platform
Interface with Business and customers for problem discovery and requirements
Build Product Demos
Work with Engineering for requirements prototyping

Various roles, IBM July 2001 to June 2012

Work with customers to build and optimize their OLTP and OLAP environments
Develop architecture scoping documents for various relational database components for Informix and DB2
Manage and lead engineering tasks on database components from design to production
Build database tools and frameworks around administration and database connectivity including JDBC, .NET and PHP connectors
Develop code for optimizing Informix SQL Query cost-based optimizer and join optimizations
Developed code to build OLAP windowing functions in Informix
Design and implement SQL API for IBM Informix and DB2 administration commands

Engineer and Architect, Informix February 1999 to July 2001 (Acquired by IBM

The Practice of Big Data:: Kansas City Lunch n Learn
A Scalable Data Transformation Framework with Hadoop MapReduce and HBase:: Hadoop Summit, San Jose 2014
Integrating Hadoop into your Data Processing environment:: DBTA Data Summit 2014
Data Warehousing with Informix:: IBM Information On Demand Conference, various years
IBM Informix In-memory Data Warehouse Accelerator:: IBM IOD Conference, customer sites