Steven G. Harms

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Personal Statement

I love learning and experimentation. I draw on a background including 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: Integrated Workforce Experience 2010-03 – 2011-07

  • Created standard development kit for Java developers using a Java Container / JSR-168 / JSR-286 (Portlet) stack. Standardized deployment and installation of the stack to three OS platforms using Ant. Reduced developer time to first code contribution from 4--8 business days to 30 minutes thanks to automation, documentation, and video. Estimated cost savings was 250,000USD
  • Evangelized standardized SDK (see above) and have on-boarded over 100 developers to date. Provided estimated savings nearing 750,000USD
  • Ran bi-monthly technology session and moderated the developer peer support forum
  • Maintained CI environment (Hudson), artifact repository (Maven), and SCM branches (Subversion)
  • Was loaned to Cisco Quad product business unit to migrate builds from a single, monolithic, Ant-run build to Maven while having no impact on development timelines
  • Delivered the first release of the Cisco Quad-powered social collaboration solution (Integrated Workforce Experience) to 90,000+ person organization. This is the first and largest reference implementation of the Cisco Quad product as a platform. Wrote automation to permit operations track to deploy, roll-back and re-install at scale (68 VMs). Wrote hot-fix tooling to allow for deployment of patches, updates, and configuration changes as part of a stability tiger team
  • Completed Scrum Master training and lead the largest scrum track within the program. Delivered two major releases of the Integrated Workforce Experience powered by Cisco Quad solution. Led team in delivery of 4 new applications, 2 major rewrites, and 500+ feature requests, user stories, and bug fixes
  • Continued SDK standardization and tooling activities across multiple platforms with a focus on accelerating developer time to market. Further details under NDA

Cisco Systems Senior I.T. Engineer: Collaboration Platform 2005-04 – 2010-03

  • 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 for forum and blogging framework implementation
  • 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 May 2009
  • 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 allowed 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
  • 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. Built 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. Built 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 and 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-– 200

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-– 200

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-– 199

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:

Exhaustive list availabe at http://github.com/sgharms

LatinVerb → Est: 2011-03-04 Category: Linguistics Language: Ruby

[http://github.com/sgharms/LatinVerb]

A Ruby library that programmatically conjugates Latin Verbs from 4 principal parts into all verbal parts, moods, persons, etc.

LatinIRB → Est: 2011-06-09 Category: Linguistics Language: Ruby

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

A Ruby tool that allows a Latin student to enter a String containing the four principal parts and then apply (with tab-completion) lookup methods on that instance or create a chart.

Verba Latina in Viis Ferrorum (Latin on Rails) → Est: 2011-06-09 Category: Linguistics Language: Ruby

[http://verbalatina.heroku.com]

A Rails tool that allows a Latin student to explore a collection of Latin verbs which can then by expanded out into their unique instances via a web UI. Students can explore connections in meaning, source , congnaissance via web.

RDoc → Est: 2011-03-17 Category: Ruby Language: Ruby

[http://github.com/sgharms/rdoc/commits/master]

The tool used to generate documentation in the Ruby standard package had a bug in parsing documents where the =begin/=end style of comment bracketing was used. I patched this.

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.

Valid XHTML + RDFa

XML lovers and machines might prefer the RDF version.

Or, you might want to see this résumé's RDF turned into a graph.

Or, if you want to print it out, you might like a pdf.

Generated by m4resume: http://github.com/sgharms/m4resume