Alan Bailward

I was extremely challenged by the work at Layer 7 Technologies as their OS Developer.  I bridged the Developers and QA techs in defining and maintaining the server based embedded networking appliance operating system.  My biggest accomplishment was to drastically decrease the build time for building system images.  I took a “by-hand”, very prone to human error system and turned it into almost a completely automated system based on Kickstart and a variety of scripts and utilities.

I ensured that the OS was STIG (US Military secure specification) compliant and developed an SELinux enabled build of the system.  I was also responsible for the development ESX server versions of the software.  Because of my past sysadmin experience, I was pulled into maintaining the development servers and company network services.

I had always wanted to work as a sysadmin, and know the joy of having tens or hundreds of computers at my beckon call to bend to my will.  Eventually I got my wish.  I was hired on to a small ISP and Manged Service provider which was bought about a year later by Uniserve Corporation, one of the mid-sized ISPs in Vancouver.  I was responsible for anywhere from 30 to 50 Linux, BSD, Solaris, and windows servers.

The systems team I was a part of was in charge of dealing with spam filtering, maintaining the IBM blade server and SAN which housed the mail cluster, doing break-fix work and supporting the other teams. In this time I dealt with client communications, server room maintenance design and setup, and learned the intricacies of working in a 24/7/365 environment.  I also stretched my web design skills and helped design and develop a client management and bandwidth tracking system for one of the major movie studios in Vancouver.  This is akin to the “you must log in to surf the net” systems that hotels and airports have.

After the dot com bust I got into the web application development world.  This involved my own contracting company working in tandem with web developers.  “They make it pretty, I make it work” was how I described what I did.  I worked on everything from a web based insurance underwriting system to educational website games and utilities to fully functional Content Management Systems.  These systems were designed under the LAMP stack with pure mod_perl, EmbPerl, HTML::Mason and a variety of other Perl based systems. Other projects include

• A generic and full featured CMS written to be re-used and customized.  It also includes a contact management system, mailing list engine, and templating language.
• A real estate system allowing propery uploading via secure login and searching and display to the public.  This also had many of the contact and mailing list features.
• A website builder called Rubber Toaster, which is basically a one-step-removed Content Management Sytem.  It allows users to create content for websites, apply the skin (this is the “make it pretty” part), design the pages, images, and web galleries, and then download it for use.  It was also a full e-commerce system, allowing purchase online by credit card.

Time moved along and the dot com era happened, Netmaster was renamed to Merilus, and I took position as Senior Developer.  Merilus were the creators of (among other things) the FireCard, the first PC on a PCI card.  The embedded nature of the Firecard required me to take position as the lead C programmer.  In this position I created many of the utilities that were used for system monitoring and data transfer between the Java based client and the card.  I also led a small team of programmers with skills in Java, Perl and C.

The nature of the programming with that was done involved a lot of fast moving, agile team work.  I worked closely with the front end Java team and architected many high performance utilities.  Amongst my programming accomplishments are

• An encrypted data transfer system for client/server communications
• A unique DHCP-like system that allowed the Java client to find the headless Firecard on the local network with a variety of failovers to ensure that the system would never be “lost” on the network.

I think almost everyone in the technology industry of a certain age has a dot com story.  Mine starts with a little company called Netmaster Networking.  I was employed as a junior programmer creating perl code for the system and the web based administration for the NICS system, a firewall and network router system.  This is where I got my foundation in web applications, and working with a small team to create fast and agile code.  We also dealt with security, network design, firewalls and VPNs.

My foray into the technical work world was a four year tenure as technical support and system administration for the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board.  In this time I was responsible for helping transition to a new and more modern dial up system as technical support.  This involved a lot of user education, patience, and delving deep into the bowels of system configuration.  In this time I learned the art of troubleshooting and client communications.

Additionally, after I moved into the position of system administration I was responsible for the monthly creation of the Real Estate catalog.  This was a do-or-die situation, and had to be done right every week, rain or shine.  I also improved the efficiency of image processing and data collection for the Real Estate Board’s web based initiative as REALTORs were allowed to submit their own images and data.