Oscar Cwajbaum

1177 Branham Lane #387
San Jose, CA 95118
resume@oscarc.net

Strengths

• Software engineering. Well-designed, well-written code delivered on-time and on-budget; working with other team members including QA and program management to deliver a product that delights the customer.
• Project management skills, including planning, budgeting, and implementation tracking. For instance, delivered the Blazer 4.0 web browser on time, in budget, with all major features implemented, and stable.
• Organization and departmental efficiency. Organized Tandem's Unix Business Systems department, which resulted in much higher customer satisfaction and quicker response times without increased headcount.

Technical Skills

Work Experience

• Maintained and enhanced TiVo's TE Server product for MSOs.
• Redesigned and reimplemented the application installer.
  • Separated the application installer from the OS installer, reducing the effort required to move to new OS releases by 75%.
  • Simplified the steps required to install the application, reducing application install time from 14 hours to 2 hours.
  • Added error and sanity checking, which increased IT-Operations and QE efficiency.
• Led the project to port TE Server to 64-bit.
  • This greatly increased its performance and scalability when running on newer hardware.
• Implemented the Web UI for several new features.
• Reimplemented portions of the EPG data import pipeline.
  • This improved the scalability and reliability of EPG import processing.
• Improved communications and coordination amongst Engineering, QE, and IT.
  • As a result, engineering was better able to meet customer needs on schedule and on budget.
• Led the effort to move from developing and testing on physical servers to VMware Lab Manager.
  • Switching to VMware decreased hardware and support costs.
  • Engineers were more productive on VMware because of Lab Manager features such as snapshots and VM templates.
  • VMware Lab Manager allowed engineers to create their own personal development clusters, allowing engineers to test their changes without interfering with other engineers.

• Managed all corporate systems, including routers and switches, Exchange, Active Directory, backups, wireless, and end-user systems.
• Upgraded corporate email server from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.
• Maintained and upgraded the infrastructure for Trovix's first product, Trovix Recruit.
• Migrated all Recruit-related systems to a new datacenter without any customer impact.
• Designed and implemented the infrastructure for Trovix's second product. Set up an automated network installation using PXE and Kickstart for new servers.
• Migrated Linux servers from single shared login to Active Directory Integrated Authentication using Samba, increasing security and accountability.

• Integrated a third-party HTML layout engine into the browser, including coordinating joint development, reporting and escalating bugs, and managing the vendor relationship.
• Designed and implemented most user-interface components. For example, designed and implemented the entire bookmarks feature, including back-end SQLite database, worker thread for handling bookmark requests, and calls to the widget toolkit.
• Trained the Software QA team to find the root cause of rendering bugs, reducing the number of duplicate bugs and increasing the bug fix rate.

• Took over responsibility for a critical source management tool that had been poorly maintained. Gathered input from users and evaluated the state of the tool. Rewrote the tool to be more robust, fixed many bugs, and added top user-requested features while maintaining backwards-compatibility.
• Assisted with integration of Handspring and Palm's software engineering systems.

• As the PalmOS Web Browser engineering lead for Blazer 4.0, managed all aspects of development, including writing specifications for both in-house development and for technology partners, overseeing implementation and testing, roadmap planning, mentoring other engineers, and working with QA to provide adequate test coverage.
• Delivered Blazer 4.0 on time, in budget, stable, and feature complete for PalmOne's Fall/Winter 2004 products, including the Treo 650 and the Tungsten T5. Based on early user feedback, Blazer 4.0 has addressed every significant shortcoming in Blazer 3.0 as much as was possible given the limits of the underlying OS and hardware.
• Successfully adapted Blazer 3.0, which was designed for use solely on cellular data networks, for the Tungsten/Zire products, which use Bluetooth and WiFi.
• Managed the technical relationship with Access Systems America, PalmOne's browser technology vendor. This included managing roadmaps, writing implementation specifications, providing technical assistance, assigning bugs, verifying API-level fixes, and acting as the primary point-of-contact for all technical issues.

• Windows infrastructure improvements, including: migrated from WinNT domains to Win2K Active Directory, from Exchange 5.5 to 2000, from Win98 to Win2K on all end-user desktops, merging the European and Japanese IT infrastructure with Corporate, and implementing network-based software distribution and AD Group Policies. These improvements, as well as many others, allowed Handspring to decrease the number of Helpdesk calls by 50%, improved average response times from 2.5 days to 4 hours, and increased customer satisfaction, while reducing Helpdesk headcount relative to the number of employees (from 1:100 to 1:200).
• Ecommerce website improvements, including: successfully transitioned from outsource vendor, fixed the problems left behind by that vendor, improved monitoring coverage and accuracy, and rearchitected the network. These improvements cut the cost of running this environment by 66%, while improving availability and response times.
• Handled the day-to-day administration of internal servers, firewalls, load balancers, switches, and routers. Documented and implemented standard procedures, and increased the use of automation; this reduced the need for more sysadmin headcount as the number of nodes being administered more than doubled. In Handspring's managed services network, IT Operations met customer SLAs 100% of the time, eliminating the need to pay costly penalties.

• Planned and implemented pilot installation and production rollout of the selected monitoring packages, including customization and integration. Also wrote many apps and scripts to integrate components and provide reporting. The new monitoring infrastructure allowed WebMD to discover problems proactively instead of depending on customer problem reports. This improved customer satisfaction. The reporting components allowed WebMD to provide quantitative availability reports to potential customers, making it easier to sell WebMD's services.

• Managed the high-volume E-Greetings ecommerce site, including overseeing other operations and internal-IT system administrators. Maintained high site availability throughout peak holiday periods. Acted as project manager for site upgrade projects.

• Acted as department team lead, including 6 months as interim department head. Coordinated all departmental projects and initiatives. Wrote the budgets and planned for future post-funding growth.
• Negotiated many vendor contracts, including colocation, voice phone service, Internet connectivity, and hardware purchases. Was able to reduce fixed costs by 33% while maintaining (or, in some cases, improving) service.

• Led a team of three Unix system administrators who administered key financial and customer support servers.

Education

• BS Computer Science: University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
• Microsoft Certified: Windows MCSE