Christopher Z. Collier
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4 Franklin St.
Charlestown, MA 02129
(617) 721-6197
czcollier gmail
Software engineer with a drive to create innovative, high-quality software.
Computer science background; ten years of software development experience;
ability to build clean and well-constructed software; desire to solve difficult
and unmet problems; leadership and mentoring ability; strong analytic,
interpersonal and communication skills; a passion for computing.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
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* Senior Software Engineer: Bullhorn, Inc. Boston, MA Nov. 2010 - Present
Architected and implemented major features for a Web-based SaaS
application servicing 30,000+ users across 2,500+ customer organizations.
Led development of a mobile version of the product; successfully shipped
the project to major customers. Act as Scrummaster, team lead and mentor
as necessary. Actively involved in developing future directions for
cloud-based systems architectures for new company products.
* Principal: Nevo Technologies, Inc. Cambridge, MA Nov. 2005 - Nov. 2010
Provide technical leadership and ensure high quality of work for software
projects. Act as tech lead, coder, mentor, project manager and client
liaison as necessary. Bring focus on developing shippable software with
maximum business value to project teams. Successfully shipped several
$1M+ sized projects on time to referenceable clients.
* Projects: Marketing Tracker, BIS (Client: Bingham McCutchen, LLP)
Led development of both a custom marketing informatics system and a
business intake system for a 1200+ attorney law firm. Introduced Scrum,
continuous integration (TeamCity), TDD, Subversion, OR mapping
(NHibernate) and several other technologies and techniques to the existing
software development group. Mentored developers on use of these
technologies and good programming habits. Coded major pieces of both
applications. Technologies: .NET 3.5, C#, F#, LINQ, NHibernate 2.x,
NUnit, Visual Studio 2008, 2010, T4, JQuery, SQL Server 2005, TeamCity,
CruiseControl.NET
* Project: Publisher Central (Client: Copyright Clearance Center)
Led development of a public-facing application providing management of and
comprehensive reporting on accounts with Copyright Clearance Center.
Continuously worked with business to refine project requirements. Shipped
several project releases on time. Coded large portions of the
application. Technologies: Java 5, J2EE 1.2 & 1.3, Struts 1.2, Jython,
Maven, Eclipse, Netbeans, Oracle OC4J, Oracle OAS; Oracle database 9i &
10g, Spring IOC, AJAX/Javascript, JSP, Lucene, Solr
* Project: copyright.com (Client: Copyright Clearance Center)
Oversaw UI development of a complete re-implementation of Copyright
Clearance Center's corporate website, including a large public-facing
e-commerce component. Technologies: Java 1.4; J2EE 1.1; Oracle database
9i, Struts 1.1, OAS, OC4J
* Project: Rightsphere (Client: Copyright Clearance Center)
Architected rich AJAX-based user interface and data transport layers for a
high-traffic, broadly available Copyright rights advisory application
marketed to large corporate customers. Solved problems involved with
delivery of a rich, dynamic web interface to global customers.
Technologies: Java 1.4; J2EE 1.1; Oracle database 9i, Struts 1.1, OAS,
OC4J, Isomorphic (Rich Web UI libaray)
* Consultant: British Telecom Conferencing, Inc., Braintree, MA
May 2004-Nov. 2005
Developed software to integrate Salesforce.com into British Telecom
Conferencing's existing operational infrastructure. This included a
de-duping system that performed textual analysis on records across databases
to compute similarity measures, find potential duplicates and graphically
display the textual differences. Application contributed significantly to
company data's cleanliness and consistency. Technologies: J2EE, SOAP,
Hibernate 3, Struts, Apache Tomcat, JDBC/ODBC, Oracle 9i, PL/SQL, Python,
Jython, Salesforce.com
* Software Engineer: Lavastorm Technologies, Inc. Boston, MA
December 2001 - May 2004
Member of the development team for a successful and complex billing analysis
and restitution/data warehousing product for telecom clients. Designed and
built large components of the product in C++, Java and PL/SQL, established
product standards for the interaction of front-end technologies, followed the
product through several design/build/test/release cycles, conducted
communications with clients regarding design requirements, functionality and
technical issues. Technologies: C++, Java, Apache Tomcat, Caucho Resin,
JDBC/ODBC, Oracle 8i, PL/SQL, Python
* Software Engineer: Lavastorm Technologies, Inc. Waltham, MA
December 1999 - August 2001
Developed front-end and business logic software for high-volume e-commerce
web sites in C++, Java and PL/SQL. Technologies: C++, COM+, Java, Apache
Tomcat, Caucho Resin, JDBC/ODBC, Oracle 8i, PL/SQL, Perl
PERSONAL PROJECTS
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* HTTP Image Server in Python - Built for my family photo album.
Provides an HTTP access to an image library and allows transformations
(sizing, rotation, brightness/contrast, cropping) to images on the fly.
Caches transformed versions of images on filesystem to reduce server load.
Suffix Tree Based Text Indexer in Java - Project to explore real-world
performance of suffix trees for text indexing.
* Home Server - CentOS based file, Web, music and X10 server.
2TB RAID 1 storage, scheduled backups of photo library via rsync to Amazon S3.
MT-DAAPD hosts music library for iTunes clients. X10 software (heyu) provides
centralized control of various household lights and appliances.
SKILLS
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Project Management: Agile Methods, requirements gathering, project planning,
resource allocation, general software project and resource management, client
relations.
Languages: C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, C#, SQL variants.
Strong interest in programming languages, their design and effective use.
Software Design and Architecture: Significant interest in and experience with
Domain-Driven design, OR mappers (Hibernate, NHibernate, SQLAlchemy), dependency
injection (Spring, Autofac) Development Process: Test-Driven Design, Continuous
Integration systems (TeamCity, CruiseControl)
Web Technologies: Application servers and Web frameworks (J2EE, Django,
TurboGears), Web MVC frameworks (Struts, ASP.NET MVC), Web services strong
understanding of general HTTP mechanisms, Rich Web UIs (JQuery, Isomorphic)
Systems Administration: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Oracle, IIS, SQL Server. Special
interest and experience in Linux systems administration.
EDUCATION
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* Tufts University, Medford, MA
Ph.D. Research May 2004-May 2005
Examined lower bounding measures and other techniques for speeding
computation of Dynamic Time Warping and other distance measures traditionally
used for time series comparison. Applied discovered techniques to string
similarity searches, for application in computational biology and textual
analysis/text search problems.
* Tufts University, Medford, MA
Master of Science in Computer Science May 2004, GPA 3.67
Thesis Project: Artificial Nose
Developed software to identify and classify airborne compounds given time-series
data from an optical array based olfactory sensor. Employed statistical machine
learning methods. Studied accuracy of these varied techniques to determine the
optimal approach for given classification situations.
Other Projects:
* Application of the RAMBO Memory Architecture to Approximate K-Nearest Neighbor
Search Solutions for High Dimensions
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Advanced Data Structures - Spring 2003
Two schemes are presented for applying a byte-overlapped memory
architecture to approximate solutions to the K-Nearest Neighbors problem
to provide very good performance, the fastest of which has a query time of
O(d + k), for k points reported in d dimensional space.
* Random Bit Generation Using Atmospheric Radio Propagation Phenomena
Tufts University, Cryptography and Security - Fall 2002
Long-distance radio propagation phenomena are a possible source of
naturally-occurring entropy, and may be used to produce random numbers of
good quality. In this study, this method was used to generate streams of
bits which where then subject to several statistical tests for true
randomness. Variations in a distantly transmitted, sky-wave propagated
signal were used to successfully generate the random bits.
* Tufts University, Medford, MA - Certificate May 2002
Post-Baccalaureate Minor in Computer Science
* Connecticut College, New London, CT - B.A. May 1997
Architectural Studies major, concentration in Design Studies
PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
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Member of: IEEE, ACM, Regular AgileBoston conference attendee, ARRL (callsign: KB1HQM)