Mike Charlton

I moved back to Japan and because the coaching role is not possible to do remotely, I took on a more traditional developer position. I primarily worked on 2 projects: Your Tee Times and the internal Sales System. Your Tee Times was a Node/Express application written in Coffeescript, using a React front end. Lately I've been working on the legacy sales system which is an old Rails application using CouchDB as its database and GWT on the frontend.

The Palatinate group of companies includes the websites yourgolftravel.com and spabreaks.com among others. Work on public facing websites is done with Ruby on Rails, Postgresql and CouchDB. Additionally, we have started to build internal tools for managing sales contracts and the like. These tools are written in Ruby and Go. While simultateously doing a development role, I worked as the agile coach for this team. I helped introduce regular pair programming, TDD, XP style planning and mentored more junior people.

I was a member of the JET programme which is a cultural exchange program with the government of Japan. The JET programme aims to promote internationalisation by inviting overseas graduates to assist in international exchange and foreign language education. As a member of the English department at Sagara High School in Shizuoka prefecture, I was required to teach communication classes to students aged from 15 to 18 years old. A senior teacher often attended my classes, but I usually created lesson plans, taught the classes and evaluated the students independently. I used a mixture of both English and Japanese in my job, but I have taught classes entirely in Japanese or English depending on the situation.

I had originally intended to stay a single year in order to improve my Japanese and gain some teaching experience. The position was so rewarding that I ended up accepting the offer to stay for the maximum 5 year period. In order to keep my software skills somewhat current, I developed an application, JLDrill, to help people study the Japanese language. JLDrill was developed in Ruby and GTK+, using rspec as a BDD platform. JLDrill is free software and I am currently documenting various aspects of its development in my portfolio (not yet available).

Object World provided a unified communications system for small to medium sized companies based on the Microsoft Windows OS platform. The goal of unified communications is to place all communications infrastructure under a single technology rather than to have separate computing and telephony infrastructures. The main product, UC Server, integrated several 3rd party technologies such as SIP PBXs, SIP telephones, Active Directory, etc. My role was to provide SIP expertise to the team, though I worked on various aspects of the product using C++. In the latter half, I was responsible for maintaining the integrated SIP PBX, which was written in Java.

In addition to programming I also introduced appropriate process improvements to the team. The most important of these was probably the adoption of planning and tracking techniques similar to Scrum's Planning Poker or XP's Planning Game. I also encouraged the consolidation of both feature and bug tracking using the existing Bugzilla tool and built an XSLT tool to scrape data from Bugzilla and automatically produce a burn down chart on demand. I implemented a continuous build system and introduced the concept of continuous integration to the team. Finally, I modified the release processes so that program managers would have a stable build with which to demonstrate new product capabilities on a weekly basis.

myJabber was a personal communications software development company. It specialised in Jabber based instant messaging and SIP based VOIP. My duties included writing a license server in C++; SIP, SDP and STUN protocol stacks in C# and re-implementing the user interface for the VOIP soft phone. The vast majority of the code was written in C# and ran on Windows, Pocket PC (with the .NET Compact Framework) and Linux (using Mono) platforms. I was the only full time developer working for the company.

Reporting to the development director for most of my tenure, I performed a role similar to a Scrum master or XP coach. I was assigned to various teams but did not report directly to the team's manager. I was accountable for the improvement of the team's performance, not the development of the product. Working with the manager of each team, I helped implement processes that would improve performance. I also spent a great deal of my time mentoring development members. As I tried to work by example, I took on a development load of about 50%. I also compiled weekly metrics showing our development improvements.

I am currently documenting some of the interesting aspects of the processes used in these projects in my portfolio (not currently available).

I worked on the Word Perfect text conversion utilities. This is the subsystem that converts files from one format to another. I was directly responsible for the Word import filter and for reviewing the work of other developers on the team and an off site consulting team. I introduced an automated testing framework which I wrote in Perl. In the last few months before I moved to the New Ventures group, I helped work on an XML based replacement of Corel Presentations. This project was in the design stage and I helped design the core object model.

I served as both a software designer and the quality management system line agent for the C-level department (about 40 people). As the QMS Line Agent, I analysed the quality system, presented suggested improvements to management and conducted quality audits. I worked with both ISO-9001 and Trillium (which is a superset of the SEI's Capability Maturity Model).

As a software designer, I contributed to several MIS applications including PRScount and PLAP. PRScount was a legacy application that did statistical analysis of software service report trends. I developed C++ tools and statistical techniques to bolster customer confidence in the tool, saving substantial support costs.

I performed analysis, design and initial framework construction for PLAP, the Post Loadbuild Automation Package. This package was used by the loadbuild team to automate a portion of the loadbuild process. The project was designed using object oriented techniques (including use case analysis) and implemented in Perl.

I worked primarily as an architect in the PRI Legacy Architecture team. The job entailed providing feedback for architectural issues relating to PRI and ensuring product quality for over 50 features. In this role, I actively took part in feature and code change reviews. As part of my role I introduced a process which added the use of code and design reviews for all code changes within the group.

I designed and implemented two features. The first reduced the size of code in the product which helped avoid the need for memory upgrades to customers' switches, something for which Nortel would have been obliged to pay. The second feature was Release Link Trunk for PRI. This feature reduced the utilisation of trunks during certain types of forwarded calls. This feature reached over $20 million in sales in the first year. These features were implemented in Protel-2 and XPM-Pascal.

As a member of the software consulting team, I provided specialised application development services to Bell Northern Research. In this capacity, I aided the PRI legacy team in refactoring its code so that pieces could be moved from one layer to another. This also had the benefit of reducing the number of individual releases that contained PRI code. To facilitate the work, I built a web-based software architecture visualisation tool using perl.

Ubitrex was a company that created one of the first health care information systems with computerised point of care information gathering. The system allowed doctors to visualise patient information and plan care for the patents. This plan was displayed on a wireless portable terminal which also allowed nurses to enter patient information. Ubitrex Corporation was later bought and changed it's name to Continental Health Care.

I originally worked on the portable terminal. This consisted of embedded C code on the terminal and C++ networking code on Sun Workstations. Because Ubitrex was a start up company that experienced rapid growth, the software processes were initially ad hoc and eventually caused productivity problems. As part of the development team, I researched software development practices and helped implement an interactive process using Wirfs-Brock use case analysis and OMT object modelling. We also implemented very strict code reviews.

In 1993 and 1994 we introduced a new hardware platform for the portable terminal using a pen based interface and radio LAN. We took the opportunity to rewrite the terminal software and I was responsible for its initial design. I also ported the workstation code from BSD based Sun OS to Sys V based Solaris. This included moving from the C front based C++ compiler to Sun's native compiler.

While still a student at the University, I worked a mixture of full time and part time in various departments. I took a year off in 1988 to concentrate on my studies.

In 1986 and 1987 I wrote a full screen terminal emulator in FORTH that ran on various PC platforms. It provided full screen editing capabilities for the MVS mainframe.

In 1989, I worked for the physics department maintaining the data collection library in C for the time of flight mass spectrometer. I also wrote a scientific graphing program to visualize the data.

In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the astronomy department where I implemented the display and database for a telescope simulation on the Macintosh in C. Later I wrote a 3D starfield animation system for the planetarium in object oriented FORTH.