Sean M. Puckett

Software Engineer, Software Architect, Team Lead, Project Manager

Contact

Sean M. Puckett
13067 157th Court North
Jupiter, FL 33478 USA

Email: seanmpuckett(at)yahoo.com
Phone: Available via email.

Availability

Immediate for the right opportunity. Contact me with appropriate offers for prompt consideration. Preference is given to:

• Short-term contracts (<3 months) on T+E basis with or without weekly travel.
• Full time employment or long-term contracts with >80% work-at-home flexibility.

Summary

My 18 years of professional software development experience with myriad platforms, industries and markets have provided me with a wealth of knowledge and technique. I am fully versed and proficient in all aspects of the software process -- requirements gathering, design, development, testing, deployment, and team/project management -- in systems ranging from tiny assembly language real-time applications all the way up to million-user batch-mode accounting processes.

Key language skills:

• C/C++ - applications and systems level expert.
• Perl - created advanced and complex applications.
• Visual Basic (including VB.NET) - numerous applications.
• PHP - several high-traffic DB driven corporate sites.
• Flexscript - dozens of applications for Motorola products
• SQL - nearly every application featured database access
• Many other programming languages spoken fluently, others understood with familiarity. Like a rocket scientist in a foreign country, the language is the easiest part of building a rocket to master; similarly new programming languages are rarely an obstacle to project completion.

Key platforms:

• 16 and 32 bit Windows - hundreds of applications written.
• MS-DOS - hundreds of applications written.
• Pocket PC/Smartphone - a number of eVB and eVC applications.
• Palm - several complex wireless applications.
• RIM (Research In Motion) - several complex wireless applications.
• Pagewriter - dozens of applications written.
• UNIX - a dozen years of installing/administering various *NIX based systems, plus Apache/MySQL/Perl, and so on.

Experience

Associate - Outr.Net, Inc - Jupiter, FL - 06/2000 - present

As an associate, I am responsible for full-lifecycle development of applications for handheld wireless devices such as the Pocket PC/MS Smartphone, Motorola TimePort 935 and PageWriter 2000x, Research in Motion (RIM) 957, and wirelessly connected Palm (VII, V with Minstrel, Qualcomm pdQ, etc). Specific projects include:

• An iPAQ Pocket-PC based dispatch application in eVB for use by service technicians which communicates with a back-end server via wireless modem. The application includes XML defined custom forms enabling the client to alter and add forms and protocols without recompiling.
• A full-featured email client for PalmOS and Motorola platforms, "SkyBox" written for Inciscent, Inc (www.inciscent.com), in C++ (Palm) and Flexscript (Pagewriter). This client includes support for multiple inboxes and file attachment handling. I was responsible for the UI design, client architecture, and implementation of 50% of the code on each platform, and directed an assistant in the development of the remainder. I also designed the user interface for the RIM platform, subsequently developed in-house at Inciscent.
• A field-service support application for a major telecom company on the Motorola platform that distributes work orders to field engineers, and allows immediate 2-way communication of work order status, labor tracking, and comments.
• Demonstration applications for various customers and situations, under tight schedules for all platforms, used both for Outr.Net sales purposes as well as sales purposes of platform vendors as well as our clients. C++, eVB, eVC and Flexscript were used.

Many other projects developed cannot be discussed due to non-disclosure agreements, but were of similar caliber.

IT Architect - HotOffice Technologies, Inc. (defunct) - Boca Raton, FL - 11/1997 - 06/2000

I was responsible for the design and specification of all financial and analytical software processes in the company, including the corporate Intranet, the billing system, customer management systems and so on. Specific tasks include:

• Design and detailed specification of a robust, failsafe, two-way gateway for raw customer information to be transferred to the third-party billing system (Portal).
• Design and detailed specification of a full-featured pricing system with flexible plug-in modules to permit ad-hoc pricing models to be devised and applied in real-time.
• Reports and systems designed for the support of a million-customer system and include audit trails, operational redundancies, and fail-safe mechanisms to the limits of the technology.

Skills exercised in this position include: Accounting knowledge, project management, database schema analysis, end-user interaction, requirements and specifications documentation, and developer training.

I was hired at HotOffice to be the IT development team lead, which I did for approximately a year and a half, managing two developers, a tester, and a technical writer. I was then promoted to IT project manager for approximately six months, then into the IT Architect position where I remained until leaving the company.

Senior Staff Engineer - Casi-Rusco, Inc - Boca Raton, FL - 08/1996 - 11/1997

As the senior developer on the Secure Perfect product (a building access-control management tool), I was responsible for development of several significant product components, including:

• The alarm graphics editor and monitor. This graphical piece uses graphical maps to present security violations as flashing or highlighted icons. Each icon could represent more than one error condition for summary purposes, and if desired, the icons could be clicked on ala a web browser, and the user transported to a more detailed map.
• The employee security badge designer, printer, and video capture system. These units allowed the system user to design graphically attractive employee badges for use with the security system, and permitted the full compliment of vector-based graphics editing features. The badge printer would print, on demand, a composite badge including the correct design for the user's access level and the user's portrait, captured using a video-capture board and an easy-to-use capture management tool.
• A graphical scheduling AFX control, which when used in the application would allow drag-and-drop control of door lock-unlock cycles. This control featured rows for each day of the week, permitted near-infinite zooming, and could handle hundreds of on-off cycles, all adjusted graphically with the mouse.

Skills used in this position include Visual C++, MFC classes, and the AFX toolkit as well as custom print drivers, Video-For-Windows APIs and real-time graphics manipulation.

Owner - Nexi Web Engine (defunct) - Miramar, FL - 05/1996 - 03/2000

As the owner and operator of the NEXI web engine, I created a significant computer game- oriented website (AllAbout Games) which relied on advanced database and web technology, including:

• A back-end database daemon (in Perl) which handles requests from web visitors by accessing records in MySQL and GDBM databases and compositing page layout information with page content information to present the final HTML to the user. This server handled over 500,000 requests a month. (Technology -- and user load -- like this is common now, but was extremely innovative in 1996.)
• A complete "banner exchange" system, similar to Link Exchange, for support of advertising on my site and other sites who choose to join the network. This supported over 200,000 banner accesses per day on a Pentium Pro 200.

Skills exercised in this position range the gamut of web site and web server maintenance under the FreeBSD operating system, as well as design and implementation of the server itself in Perl.

Lead Systems Engineer - Coconut Code, Inc. (defunct) - Deerfield Beach, FL - 10/1994 - 08/1996

As the manager of systems development, I was responsible for the creation of a compiler and virtual machine interpreter for the company's proprietary development system. This compiler operated on the P-CODE model, and featured a simple to learn syntax combined with extremely powerful and innovative object inheritance, message handling, and full support for an event-driven Windows GUI.

As lead of a team of four other developers for the company's FSMS 6.0 restaurant management system product, I was responsible for a number of complex modules, including:

• Labor management system, including automatic time schedule generation and cost accounting
• Menu costing system, enabling restaurant owners to derive meal cost from the cost and quantities of their components
• Complete raw-materials prediction system, which would enable restaurant owners to determine how much of which menu item to prepare ahead of time, based on predictions from past customer usage
• A completely flexible and extensible cash-register data extraction system, supporting over a dozen different manufacturers of cash register each with a unique proprietary method to access daily sales data.

Skills used: C and the Windows API, compiler design and optimization, interpreter design and optimization, implementing message passing/object oriented/inheritable architectures, accounting knowledge, documentation, training, team leadership.

Owner - Albino Frog Software, Inc. - Jupiter, FL - 10/1993 - present

Design, program, and market shareware programs for the Windows 95/98/NT operating systems, including:

• FileHound, a WWW/FTP downloading agent enabling error-recovery and transfer resumption and unlimited simultaneous downloads. I wrote all of the Internet transfer protocol support (FTP and HTTP) by hand, making use of non-blocking TCP/IP socket communications and round- robin session management. (MFC) (1997)
• ClipHound, a system clipboard assistant. This tool enables the user to manage many different clip-board data segments easily, and to recall them by name when needed. This tool enables the use of boilerplate" text for word-processing or email to be readily used. (MFC) (1997)
• ROSCOE, a game development system consisting of a full game development environment featuring a sprite editor, background editor, sound editor and code editor based on a object model allowing for independent actor interaction via message passing. The ROSCOE compiler would collate game graphics, sounds, and level design, compile the game code into PCODE, and prepare a single output file which was run with the small ROSCOE runtime. All released games were under 320K in size. (C and 8086 assembly) (1992)
• Pulse, a fast-paced Tetris-like game built using my game development engine ROSCOE.(1995)
• Galacta, an arcade shoot-em-up style game, built with ROSCOE. (1994)
• Helious, a challenging puzzle/adventure game, built with ROSCOE.(1994)
• Tom and Jerry, an arcade game for the PC DOS, developed using ROSCOE (Sold at retail by Hi Tech Expressions) (1993)
  Barbie's Adventure, an arcade game for the PC, DOS, developed using ROSCOE (Sold at retail by Hi Tech Expressions) (1992)

Skills used include Borland C, Visual C++, MFC classes, the standard Windows API, the Winsock library, 80x86 assembly programming, Sound Blaster/AdLib sound programming, and hardware-level CGA/EGA/VGA/MGA graphics programming.

Owner - Loreli Multi-line BBS (defunct) - Miramar, FL - 02/1989 - 04/1994

As the owner and manager of a multi-line for-profit BBS, my responsibilities include not only maintenance and upkeep of the system, but developing new and unique entertainment and interaction software modules to keep customers involved. All modules supported multiple simultaneous users operating in real-time communication on a 4.77 MHZ computer. Modules I developed included:

• Usenet newsreader software written in perl, synchronizing with Nova University via UUCP
• Internet mail client, in perl, supporting attachments via uuencode/decode
• Advanced teleconferencing system with multiple rooms, gag/ignore, channel moderation, and other features.
• Multi-user real-time games including one of the first user-programmable role-playing games (MUDs), created in 1989.

Many of these modules were resold through a network of BBS operators running similar system software.

Skills used included: BTrieve, low level UART serial programming in C and 8086 assembly, Coherent & Mark Williams 'Unix' operating system administration.

Co-owner - Codesmiths, Inc (defunct) - Miramar, FL - 04/1988 - 10/1993

With a partner, pitched, designed, developed and supported retail software offerings as a vendor to first-party publishers for the IBM PC, Atari 800, Commodore 64 and Apple II. Over 30 products in six years spanning games, education, and personal productivity genres. One game (Search for the Titanic) featured as a front-cover story of Commodore magazine, including an interview with myself and my partner.

Also responsible for the specification and implementation of a networked computing environment for a local business, including programming various financial applications in FoxPRO.

Lead Developer - Hi-Tech Expressions (defunct) - Coconut Grove, FL - 08/1985 - 04/1988

Managed 2-3 other developers in designing and coding retail software products for the IBM PC, Atari 800, Commodore 64 and Apple II. Over 10 products in three years including games, educational titles, and personal productivity products.

Developer - Star Systems Software, Inc (defunct) - Casselberry, FL - 08/1984 - 05/1985

Was responsible for porting the company's lead retail product, HomePak, to the Commodore 128, using the ACTION! language and 6502 assembly language.

dBASE II Developer - American Bankers Insurance Group, Inc - Cutler Ridge, FL - 01/1984 - 07/1984

As a "floating" programmer, I was sent to various departments in the company to create customized solutions in dBASE II on the IBM PC I also performed my own project management and tracking with Project 6.

Freelance developer, writer - Self Employed - Homestead, FL - 01/1981 - 04/1984

Pursued a variety of for-pay computer interests during my school years, including two cover story articles (Quatrainment and Reversi)for Compute! Magazine, modifying TRS-80 BASIC financial and real-estate oriented applications, and so on. Several of articles were reprinted in books from which I received royalty payments for several years.

References

Available upon request.