Résumé for Steven G. Harms

Personal Statement

I love learning and experimentation. I draw on a background that includes philosophy, business, classics, code, and nine years of industry experience to provide innovative solutions, to ask non-obvious questions, and to push the boundaries of what is perceived as possible.

I am looking for a passionate start-up opportunity or an enterprise that is ready to shake up its old way of thinking about how to enable collaboration.

Work Experience

Cisco Systems Senior I.T. Engineer: Communication and Collaboration Platform 2005-04–2009-07

Authored 5–point, 2–year legacy systems migration strategy to move all backbone mail services to a standardized, turnkey environment. Implementation completed 2008
Led technical team responsible forum and blogging framework deployment
Created business requirements document and RESTful API specification for new generic list-abstraction repository and interface: allows disparate downstream systems (including mail) to access and utilize the same list structures for mail, calendar, voice mail, meeting invite, etc. Implemented 2009-05
Created standard specification for all applications environments with respect to standard, accepted mail routing behavior: policy document, Sendmail.mc for Solaris, Linux
Created registry process and web tool for application host systems that use e-mail as transport layer. This should help identify / remediate non-compliant systems that are using our data through unsupported interfaces so that we can help them come into compliance
Wrote script to deploy core mailing list host data repository, web interface, mail interface, and build scripts from M4 macro definitions + Bash + Perl. This allows an entire environment to be built and deployed into a segregated space by configuring a single macro specification file
Collaborated with University of Texas Information, Risk, and Operations Management Management Information Systems steering committee to specify next generation of skill-set foci
Through efforts in the previous 6 years, reduced head-count to 1 full time employee and a vendor team. Realized net savings in excess of 320,000USD

Cisco Systems Systems Administrator / I.T. Developer: Enterprise Messaging Systems 2001-04–2005-06

Member of 5-person team changed with backbone mail systems upon which ~1bn/month mail flow. Build anti-spam, anti-malware solution
Managed fleet of 10 HP servers, a dozen Mirapoint appliances
Migrated legacy environment of spool-based and Mirapoint-based clients to Exchange 2000
Designed Out of Office scanner / handler to prevent MS Exchange from feeding spam engines / spamming external mailing lists / causing infinite mail storm loops due to its "everyone gets a bounce" design
Established messaging team standard Perl module set / CVS repository / Subversion repository
Built common framework for Sendmail-based processing, filtration, and re-routing. Built 3 special-use appliances using single polymorphic code base (Google Code CMailguard)
Built software solutions for turnkey rebuild of core infrastructure components to increase resiliency in event of attrition or disaster. Build entire deploy suite in M4 which allowed customization to disaster environment by changing fewer than 10 values
Migrated primary web interface for list data repository from non–validating HTML 4 Frameset specification to XHTML–compliant, CSS–based, Template::Toolkit design. User interface performed six times faster

Cisco Systems I.T. Analyst: Engineering Support Analyst 2000-06–2001-04

Tracked top 5 issues quarter to quarter. After 3 quarters of implementation, support calls dropped, on average, 100 cases per quarter
Identified training gaps: created training and delivered to employees in 3 theatres
Moved client satisfaction rating from 74 to 95 percent, the highest seen to that date
Developed lead + application owner support relationship still in use today. After performing liaison role, messaging team requested my transition to their team
Designed web-based Web-vacation mail tool. Tool reduced support calls from 500 per quarter to 25. Net savings of 30,000 USD estimated savings per annum realized

Education

University of Texas at Austin
Major: Management Information Systems
Minor: Dutch
Dates: 1995-2000

Bachelor of Business Administration

A multi-disciplinary approach that blends a base in business administration with a focus in building enterprise IT systems. Attention is paid to programming basics, project management, and consulting. The program culminates with a real-world project delivered to an Austin community organization.

University of Texas at Austin
Major: Philosophy
Minor: Dutch
Dates: 1995-2000

Bachelor of Arts

A classic liberal arts program in philosophy with focus on pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, German Idealism (Hegel), and Philosophy of science.

Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands
Major: Dutch
Minor: Philosophy of Science
Dates: 1997-1998

During a one-year study abroad term I studied advanced classes in Dutch speaking, writing, grammar, and composition. I also took 3 classes in the faculty of Philosophy: Rise of Scientific Europe, Seminar on Scientific Revolutions, and Rationality of Emotions.

Courses

Beginning Cocoa Bootcamp

Taken: 2005-02 http://bignerdranch.com/classes/beginning_cocoa.shtml

Intensive 5-day training course covering the basics of Cocoa / Objective-C programming on Mac OSX.

Ruby on Rails Bootcamp

Taken: 2006-02 http://bignerdranch.com/classes/beginning_ruby_on_rails.shtml

Intensive 5-day training course covering the basics of Ruby on Rails development.

Red Hat Certified Engineer Bootcamp

Taken: 2003-05 http://bignerdranch.com/classes/beginning_ruby_on_rails.shtml

Intensive 5-day training course covering Linux administration.

Skills

Rated by proficiency on a 5-point scale with 5 being highest.

Technical Skills

Perl (5)

HTML (5)

XHTML (5)

Shell Scripting (5)

Linux Administration (5)

vim (5)

CSS (4)

XHTML+RDFa (4)

Ruby (4)

git (4)

svn (4)

emacs (3)

Rails (3)

M4 (3)

PHP (3)

RDF (3)

RDFa (3)

Metadata (3)

Apache (3)

Systems Administration (3)

Sendmail (3)

Unit Testing (3)

object-oriented design (3)

mySQL (2)

postgres (2)

Cocoa (2)

Java (2)

Semantic Web (2)

Javascript (2)

Solaris Administration (2)

Ruby metaprogramming (2)

Internationalization(i18n) (2)

Unicode (2)

Language Skills

Dutch (4)

French (2)

Latin (3)

Open-source projects:

VerbaLatina → Est: 2008-08-26 Category: Linguistics Language: Ruby

[https://github.com/sgharms/verbalatina/tree/master]

A Rails application that wraps a library set that programmatically conjugates regular Latin Verbs from 4 principal parts into all verbal parts, moods, persons, etc.

Linguistics Package → Est: 2003-07-09 Category: Linguistics Language: Ruby

[http://github.com/bruce/linguistics/tree/master]

Linguistics is a framework for building linguistic utilities for Ruby objects in any language. It includes a generic language-independant front end, a module for mapping language codes into language names, and a module which contains various English-language utilities.

CMailguard → Est: 2008-07-06 Category: Sysadmin Language: Perl

[http://code.google.com/p/cmailguard/]

For mail architectures that are highly distributed, consolidating mails and running elgibility-to-send to certain addresses is difficult and problematic. Mailguard is designed such that addresses can be routed to a central server. Upon reaching the server, the data is sent via STDOUT into the mailguard application. The application then classifies the sender and based on configuration parameters decides whether the mail should be silently discarded, forwarded on, or put into a holding pen until the message can be validated by a moderator.

M4Resume → Est: 2009-07-09 Category: Productivity Language: M4

[https://github.com/sgharms/m4resume/tree]

Tool for writing résumés in M4, and then having it flexibly build them into a variety of formats: LaTeX, XHTML, and XHTML+RDFa.

latintools → Est: 2009-28-01 Category: Linguistics Language: Ruby

[https://github.com/sgharms/latintools/tree/master]

Tools for entering LaTeX; useful for Latin writing quickly through Textmate; also has code for converting LaTeX-glyphs at CLI to HTML or UTF-8 codes.