Steven P. Valliere
| Rockledge, Florida 32955 | Email: NewJob
in the svalli
dot com
domain (apologies for the messed up email, but I was up over 100 SPAMs per day to the previous, unobfusticated one) |
A growth opportunity with a company that would benefit from my ability to solve software problems as well as create new programs.
1990 to present Electronic Visions, Inc
Rockledge, FL 32955Senior Systems Analyst
Responsibilities:
1.
Writing Software for:
Distributed data acquisition, distribution and visualization
Terminal Emulators
Graphical Display Systems
Macro programming to automate tasks in other programs – such
as Microsoft Office and Kedit
Antique hardware emulators to support aging minicomputers
TCP, UDP and FTP services for a minicomputer network interface
2.
Manage the company Intranet
Firewalls connecting to Internet
Create and manage the company web site
Create and manage the company email system
Set up and maintain company file servers
Set up and maintain virtual domain hosting (email, ftp and http) for various customers
3.
Create Custom Web Sites
Active page generation with MySQL/PHP
Custom Web Pages
Custom Forms
4.
Visit Customer Locations to assist with implementation of
EVI
Software
United States Enrichment Corp. (Paducah, KY Gaseous Diffusion Plant)
Progress Energy (Crystal River Unit #3 Nuclear Plant)
Central Contra-Costa Sanitation Dept (Martinez, CA)
First Energy (Davis-Besse Nuclear Plant)
AK Steel (Cold Rolling Mill, Middletown, OH)
Glaxo (Research Triangle Park, NC)
1988 - 1990 Brevard County School Board
Rockledge, FL 32955Lead Programmer
Wrote software (in C, using Btrieve) to track student attendance and another to monitor discipline. These applications were created to replace existing paper-based systems by interviewing school office personnel, and working with them to ensure that the final product was as easy for them to use as the peper-based system had been. Both programs worked in either stand-alone or networked mode. In networked mode, the programs shared data between multiple copies of themselves and each other as well as offering an onscreen chat option for the discipline tracking module that allowed the deans to communicate quietly while each interviewed one participant in an argument. The programs were still being used as of 1999 and beyond.
1984 - 1988 US Air Force
Patrick AFB, FL 32920Space Systems Programmer
Working in the Air Force Technical Applications Center, I was responsible for the software on a computer system collecting data from a group of satellites. At least one of my PC Programs (written in compiled BASIC!) for the USAF (for which I received an achievement medal) is still being used to analyze satellite data.
The Satellite Data computer system ran a custom UNIX Variant, SMEX (Sandia Multi-tasking EXecutive) on a dual CPU Varian V77 computer. All of the sources were in C.
I was responsible for adding features on request, tracking and fixing bugs, and regular system back-ups (reel-to-reel tapes). My final job was to write a troubleshooting manual that, I learned later, eventually replaced my position because using the manual, the operators were able to resolve all of the problems they encountered until the system was retired some years later.
MS/PC-DOS (20+ yrs); Win32 (15+ yrs); Unix/Linux (10+ yrs); VAX/VMS; and MAX/IV (from MODCOMP).
Embedded systems (both DOS and Linux based); Hardware emulators (DOS based); End-user interfaces (both DOS and Win32); and ‘general’ (unattended) Distributed Win32. Assembled and built our own tiny linux (under 16MB disk image) for use in our embedded linux devices.
Highly proficient in C (20+ yrs); proficient with HTML, PHP, JavaScript; Pascal/Delphi and Basic/Visual Basic; somewhat proficient with SQL; also familiar with Fortran, Perl, TASM/MASM, Bash Shell Scripts, ASP, Python and others.
I was either the sole or the primary programmer on the following EVI Products - visible at http://www.electronicvisions.com.
PICS (all or parts) is running at two nuclear plants, a nuclear fuel plant, and a water treatment plant.
PC-LOG PICS 8800 MRN FTP services MRN VCS 8800 MX CDL DARS 8800 AV AFD REDAS 8800 CPI
Community College of USAF
1985-1986
Rollins College at Patrick AFB, FL
Associate of Science
University of Connecticut
1981-1982
Storrs, CT
University of Miami
1980-1981
Coral Cables, FL
Tolland High School
1976-1980
Tolland, CT
Graduated with honors
Provided on Request
Here are some other things about me that don't seem to fit any category I know about:
I enjoy designing and coding user interfaces. Ease of use has always been one of my primary goals because if things aren't easy to use, customers will find other things that are. I enjoy interacting with users to learn how they actually use my software so that I can improve it in ways that help make the software "disappear" so that the actual job being performed is in the foreground.
When I was at the school board, my job was primarily to support the student attendance tracking software that the board had purchased. While doing that I heard so many complaints from the users that I decided to start working on my own attendance program in my "spare" time (between support calls, mostly.) When I had created a simple first screen, I showed my boss to get permission to continue, which was granted. I used a database package that the schools already owned, so the program was effectively "free" for the county because they were already paying for for a different job that I was still doing. When I had it all working, we demonstrated it for the schools and they loved it. It was installed immediately (saving the county about $50,000/year in support costs to the company that made the software they had been using.)
The attendance software was such a hit that the high scool (and junior high) primcipals asked if I could create something to help their deans with student discipline tracking. I worked with a couple of the deans to develop a prototype and then implemented the real program in C (for a vast performance increase) and they were thrilled with it. For schools with multiple deans, I even included an instant text messaging capability that they would use when each was questioning one of the students involved in a fight or other altercation. One of the deans later told me that just showing a kid his name on the computer screen helped straighten some of them up! (Remember, this was at the end of the 1980s -- computers were still pretty novel to most people then!)
At other sites we've precisely duplicated the look, feel and functionality of existing software that we were replacing in order to keep the need for retraining to a minimum. (Later, once our system is in place, we add new displays and features as needed.) We've done this even when replacing old mini-computer based terminal systems with Windows workstations by "hiding" Windows from the users so that only an interface that they already understand is redily visible.
Starting when I was still in the USAF, I developed a reputation for being the person everyone would come to with strange and sometimes apparently unsolvable problems. Then again, they also come to me with everything that they don't feel like taking the time to figure out and/or learn.
I received an achievement medal for solving a problem many thought was impossible while in the USAF. It involved using a digitizing tablet to allow an operator to enter three points to establish a graph's axes and then additional points to be analyzed to determine of the graph showed a nuclear event (my unit monitored nuclear test ban treaties.) When tested, my program managed a better reliability rating than most of the human operators (some could do additional analysis that wasn't coded into the program.) No one believed that could be done with a personal computer at the time (it was 1985.)
Need to recover work in progress from a crashed RAM disk? Done that.
Create new software to replace code written in a language no one at the company has ever seen before? I do that every couple years.
Want to create your own embedded system (using Windows or linux)? I've done both.
Need someone to set up and manage an email server for the company? I've set up two different server systems more than once, each (due to later hardware crashes.)
How about a web server? Done that, too. Add in MySQL and PHP support? No problem. How about supporting paypal? OK. Perhaps custom interfaces so that automated devices can upload information that is immediately available in reports on the web server? I wrote one of those, too.
I sometime enjoy taking some time off to work on my own projects that integrate with other things produced by our company.
My best example was sometime around 1996, when I wanted to understand how web servers and the HTTP protocol worked with browsers. So I wrote my own web server to experiment, figured out how to serve files, made it multi-threaded, and then started integrating it with our Plant Integrated Computer System (PICS) software so that it could generate various reports on the fly, using live data from PICS. Since then the program has become a featured part of the product and had a custom template language added to allow customer designed reports to be generated in addition to the reports built-in to the program.