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Rachel Blackman 7345 18th Ave NE Seattle, WA 98115 US |
E-mail: sparks@noderunner.net Home Phone:(206)524-4637 Cell Phone:(425)466-1899 |
| Development, Developer Relations |
| OBJECTIVE |
I am seeking a job where I can use my creative talents in a team environment. Ideally a job which combines both C or C++ programming with design work and human interaction. My preferred types of jobs are those wherein the tools being created either faciliate communication between others (e-mail, IM, teleconferencing) or are related to entertainment (games, multimedia tools, animation tools). |
| Experience Level: | 7 years in industry |
| Date of Availability: | Immediately |
| EMPLOYMENT | 9/2002 - Present | Quicksilver Technologies | Seattle, WA |
| Hardware Tools Developer |
| Hired back by Quicksilver as a contract employee, and assigned to the Hardware Emulation group. Responsibilities included the maintenance of a Windows GUI program used to test various aspects of the chip, a Windows device driver for the PCI board which housed test chips or FPGAs for simulating new chip designs, the library used to talk to the chip for tests, and an ActiveX Server which allowed the chip to be driven by the Windows Scripting Engine, allowing test suites to be written in any Windows scripting language. Was responsible not only for maintaining these tools, but also for creating the test scripts using them and helping to drive the verification of various components of our microchip. |
| 3/2001 - 4/2002 | Quicksilver Technologies | Seattle, WA |
| Software Developer |
| Was part of a team which used the agile development process known as "Extreme Programming" to develop tools for assembling software simulation of a new type of adaptive microchip, and compiled code for these chips. Learned a lot about chip circuitry and compiler design, while creating both a low-level assembly language which described a chip's physical layout and a higher-level C++-like language which could describe algorithms. Reason for leaving: Company failed to attain funding, everyone in department let go. |
| 10/2000 - 3/2001 |
| Consultant |
| Since the layoffs at Seattle Lab, I did one-shot consulting jobs. Fixing or configuring network servers, doing data recovery, building small custom solutions to handle various server tasks for specific ISPs, etc. This was primarily setting up or fixing Windows NT or 2000 servers, building small custom solutions for UNIX servers or routers for ISPs, and other networking-related tasks involving FreeBSD, C, Perl, and TCP routing protocols. While these paid the bills and kept my skills in practice, not having any sort of connection to the job or work environment did not make them very fulfilling. |
| 6/2000 - 9/2000 | Seattle Lab | Kirkland, WA |
| Software Engineer |
| I was hired on initially to work on e-mail tracking and distribution technologies based on my work on Listar, but ended up working on secure communications. My responsibilities included creating a wrapper architecture to enfold 3DES, DES, and other cryptographic algorithms, implementing a parser and generator for the SSH communications protocol (version 1.5), and integrating this into the existing Telnet server package. These involved the use of Visual C++ under Windows NT and 2000 to develop services, as well as using our own in-house MFC equivalent and several cryptographic libraries. I also was to do some work on the SLMail server, but they were between revisions during the time I worked there. Reason for leaving: buyout of company and layoff of many engineers due to resulting budget cuts. |
| 2/2000 - 6/2000 | Lithtech, Inc. | Kirkland, WA |
| Developer Relations/Development |
| Monolith spun the Lithtech team into a separate company. Duties remained the same as at Monolith, with the added inclusion of writing the software documentation. Reason for leaving: began to transition away from active development or relations and into management, hired away by Seattle Lab with an attractive offer, after a year of persistent attempts to recruit me. |
| 2/1997 - 2/2000 | Monolith Productions | Kirkland, WA |
| Software Engineer/Developer Relations |
| Worked on the 3D engine technology team of a video game development house. Helped set up things such as support for the 'Bink' video compression format, support for configurable gamma correction, network optimization, 3d-accelerated mouse cursor support, and other features. I also worked on coding game objects for a number of games which used Lithtech, such as Shogo and NOLF. Also did game weapon and AI work on Blood 2 and the Blood 2 expansion pack. Development was done under Visual C++ for Windows 9x and 2000, using DirectX, DirectMusic, Bink, ColoRific, and a number of other multimedia technologies. My proudest achievement, however, was the creation and maintenance and oversight of a developer relations team. When we began to license our technology to other developers, we needed a way to accept bug reports and feature requests to handle in a timely fashion, as well as providing sample code and similar things. This was something I began working on a solution to in my spare time, and the efforts were so successful it became part of my job as well. This entailed keeping touch with developers who had licensed the engine and acting as a 'buffer' layer between the end-users and developers, and my fellow programmers, since I was able to represent technical concerns to non-technical managers at licensees fairly effectively. To further these ends, I set up an additional call-in line, an e-mail support list, and the programming track of a training course for licensees who came to Kirkland for training. Reason for leaving: Lithtech team spun off into a new separate company, so on paper it looks like a departure. |
| PROJECTS | 10/1997 - Present | Listar/Ecartis Project | Internet-based |
| Lead Architect/Developer |
| Created the original design document for a modular, extensible mailing list package, as well as the original revision. With JT Traub, extended the package and eventually released it as an Open Source project, available for Linux, FreeBSD, and a number of other platforms. Wrote custom additions and helped maintain installations for NASA, the Internet Software Consortium, and other large customers. The software is written in ANSI C for portability (it runs under almost all flavors of UNIX as well as Windows NT and MacOS X). As the primary motivating force as well as the lead architect and developer, I have been responsible for knowing the majority of e-mail related RFCs (MIME, SMTP, ESMTP, 822bis), as well as the differences in implementation between them (how ELM handles MIME differently than PINE or Outlook, for example). I have also written a proposal for a new RFC as part of this project for MLMAP, a generic administrative protocol for mailing list packages (allowing mailing lists to be administered from a common interface regardless of the software running them), though the RFC has not yet been submitted. Due to a copyright problem over the name, the project became renamed Ecartis recently. This project was always a spare-time one, and is still active. It can be found at http://www.ecartis.org/. |
| Constant | Miscellaneous Networking | Internet-based |
| Due to an ongoing interest in networking, I have kept involved in a number of network-related projects. Among them, I've worked on designing an efficient psuedo-multicasting protocol which ran on top of TCP/IP to connect various text-based adventure game servers together transparently, worked on designing an extensible protocol for sending arbitrary objects and a 'descriptor' of the objects (so that the receiving end does not need to know about a data class before the class is sent to it), and worked on designing protocols aimed at minimizing lag in large systems. |
| EDUCATION | 6/1995 | James A. Garfield High School | US-Washington-Seattle |
| High School or equivalent |
| Normal high school education, graduated with honors. National Merit semifinalist, as well. |
| SKILLS | Skill Name | Skill Level | Last Used | Experience |
| C++ | Expert | Currently used | 4 years |
| C | Expert | Currently used | 9 years |
| DirectX | Professional | 2 years ago | 3 years |
| TCP/IP and UDP | Expert | Currently used | 5 years |
| Java (and JDBC) | Expert | Currently used | 5 years |
| HTML | Expert | Currently used | 5 years |
| E-mail RFCs | Expert | Currently used | 3 years |
| Perl | Expert | Currently used | 4 years |
| Linux | Expert | Currently used | 5 years |
| FreeBSD | Expert | Currently used | 1 year |
| SunOS | Intermediate | 1 year ago | 1 year |
| SQL | Expert | Currently used | 3 years |
| Oracle | Intermediate | 2 years ago | 3 years |
| SQL*Server | Intermediate | 2 years ago | 3 years |
| REFERENCES | Matt Scott | Lithtech, Inc. | Project Manager |
| Phone Number: | (425)739-1539 |
| Email Address: | mjs@lithtech.com |
| Reference Type: | Professional |
| JT Traub | Seattle Lab / Listar Project | Software Developer |
| Phone Number: | (425)827-6342 |
| Email Address: | jtraub@dragoncat.net |
| Reference Type: | Personal |
| Jim Totaro | Monolith / Lithtech | Information Systems Manager |
| Phone Number: | (425)739-1542 |
| Email Address: | jim@lith.com |
| Reference Type: | Professional |
| Zwie Amitai | Quicksilver | Team Lead |
| Phone Number: | (206)749-1001 |
| Email Address: | zwie.amitai@qstech.com |
| Reference Type: | Professional |