Overview

25+ years of programming experience (10+ years working professionally since 2001), and 15+ years of Linux experience.
Started programming at age 5 using BASIC on Tandy Color Computer 3 and Amiga 500. Gained experience with NetWare 286 and 3.x. Learned rudimentary electronics (e.g. 555 timers circuits).
Linux and other free/open-source software since 1998.
Bachelor's degree in Electronic Systems Engineering since 2006.
Passionate about ubiquitous cryptography, usable APIs, free software, free culture, open science, maker culture, public interest.
Preferred role: Mid-level software engineer on well-disciplined, agile team (pair programming ideal), working closely with customers, stakeholders, and FOSS communities.

Employment Experience

Aug 2014 - Nov 2014	Software Engineer InboxApp, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA Information Security Develop credential storage & proxy server to prevent compromise of plaintext passwords in authenticated IMAP & SMTP connections. Identify security issues and risks, and develop mitigation plans Technology: Python 3, Flask, Docker, Ansible, NaCl/libsodium, protobufs, capability-based access control.
Jul 2012 - Aug 2014	Software Engineer Dropbox, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA Design, implement, and deploy performance, usability, and privacy improvements to the Dropbox desktop application software. Development of best practices for managing the complexity and engineering cost of maintaining a large code base. Security reviews of software, processes, protocols, use of cryptography, etc. Cross-platform Python software development. Experience working with large-scale distributed systems. Technology: Python, Pylons, C, Objective C, Go.
Nov 2008 - Jun 2012	Software Developer, Research and Development PatientWay (Infonium Inc.), Ottawa, ON, Canada Patient self-service technology for hospitals and other health-care organizations. Designed, developed, and maintained several key pieces of PatientWay's products, based on the needs of patients and hospital staff, internal objectives, and technical constraints Designed and implemented back-end integration technology—using a variety of HL7 messaging, scriptable terminal emulation, Windows GUI scripting, and SQL access—depending on customer needs and the existing, site-specific configuration. Developed a scriptable terminal emulator from scratch, with customer usability, fail-safety, and auditability in mind. An old version is available on GitHub. Developed flowchart-based workflow engine and language, designed to enable multiple people with varying levels of technical and domain expertise to create and modify the same program. Received training and familiarity with agile software development methodology. Technology: Ruby on Rails, running on Glassfish/J2EE using JRuby.
May 2007 - Apr 2008	Information Technology Analyst Open Systems Canada Limited, Regina, SK, Canada Provided IT consulting to OSCL's customers; Developed internal systems. Developed a robust rsync-like customer data backup system. Recovered customer data manually after hardware RAID failure. Isolated a deadlocking bug in Paramiko (a Python SSH implementation). Discovered cryptographic weakness in random number generator in Paramiko.
Jan 2006 - Apr 2008	Self Employed Ice Pillar Computing, Regina, SK, Canada Developed software and provided advice to serve the needs of my customers. Installed and maintained LAMP servers. Performed Drupal 5->7 migration. Wrote screen-scraping software in PHP for a mobile application platform. (Bluepulse) Developed an assortment of free/open-source libraries in PHP. Wrote software to process SHOUTcast streams and MP3 files.
May 2005 - Aug 2005	Embedded Systems Software Developer, Operating Systems Group Research In Motion, Waterloo, ON, Canada Developed and maintained BlackBerry operating systems. Ported the BlackBerry bootloader/firmware loader to new hardware. Wrote and analyzed security-sensitive code in BlackBerry operating systems. Implemented an entropy-gathering cryptographic random number generator. Most work was done in C and ARM Thumb assembly language.
Sep 2004 - Dec 2004	Protocol Tester, Systems and Interoperability, Research In Motion, Waterloo, ON, Canada Performed protocol testing and wrote test automation software for GSM/GPRS BlackBerry handhelds. Refactored a portion of the control software for automated testing of BlackBerry handhelds. Assisted in the design of a more comprehensive automated testing framework for BlackBerry handhelds.
Jan 2004 - Apr 2004	Engineering Assistant, Research & Development, SaskTel, Regina, SK, Canada Worked with TRLabs on several research projects. Improved an existing ultrasonic position-tracking system. Designed a (different) ultrasonic position-tracking system with a focus on increasing flexibility and lowering per-unit costs. Constructed a working prototype of a low-cost ultrasonic sensor device.
Sep 2001 - Apr 2003	Systems Analyst, Operations, LFC Hosting, Regina, SK, Canada Performed various programming, troubleshooting, system administration, and customer support duties. Analyzed, designed, proposed, and implemented software automation changes to address internal and customer needs. Provided technical leadership in software and infrastructure development. Developed hardware keyboard access control system using iButton key fobs.
Summer 2001	Network Security Administrator, Operations, LFC Hosting, Regina, SK, Canada Designed new LAN with Linux firewall for improved resilience against attack. Worked with customers and employees to resolve various technical issues.

Education

September 2001 - May 2006: Bachelor of Applied Science, Electronic Systems Engineering
University of Regina, SK, Canada
Co-operative Education Program; With Distinction
GPA: 84%

Skills & Non-Employment Experience

Contributions to Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS)

Maintain the Python Cryptography Toolkit (since 2008).
Wrote several small programs and libraries (available from my website), including:
- Several web development utilities written in PHP.
- Good Enough Cryptography (gecrypt), a command-line password-based encryption utility designed to provide both strong confidentiality and strong authentication.
- PySFTPd - Python SFTP server
- lfingerd - Finger protocol server designed with security in mind.
- FreeBASIC TV Batball - Pong-style game.
- libverisignfix - LD_PRELOAD hack used to work around VeriSign SiteFinder (circa 2003)
- TTFSampler - Generates sample sheets from TrueType fonts using Python and ReportLab.
- ice_cube_english - easy date expansion in English
Discovered and fixed important random number generation bugs in Paramiko (a Python SSH library used by the bzr revision control system). (CVE-2008-0299)
Discovered and fixed Blowfish encryption weakness in "dar" disk archive tool. (CVE-2007-3528)
Added maildir support to WMBiff.
Added fine page-table mapping support to the SkyEye ARM CPU simulator.
Minor bugfixes to Bitcoin P2P digital currency software.
Many other minor contributions.

Electronics Engineering / Embedded Systems

Electronics: familiar with basic circuit design, state machines, microcontrollers, JTAG debugging
Programming (assembly language): ARM, Atmel 8-bit AVR, Intel 8051 (Dallas Semiconductor 80C390 variant), Intel IA-32 (x86), Motorola/Freescale MC9S12
Digital design: some (limited) experience writing VHDL and Verilog for synthesis on Xilinx FPGA devices
3rd-year engineering project: With a colleague, developed a device that traces a 16x8-pixel monochrome image onto a flat surface using a red diode laser and a spinning mirror.
Final-year engineering project: With a colleague, developed a drop-in radio link encryption system for use with SCADA systems in the oil and gas industry. (Partially completed; exceeded time budget.)

Computers / Information Technology

Programming (familiar): assembly languages (see above), Python (2.1 through 3.4), C, Ruby (including Ruby on Rails), Java, JavaScript, PHP
Programming (somewhat familiar): C++, CoffeeScript, Go, Perl, Visual Basic, and others
Linux: since 1998; currently used as primary desktop and server operating system
Information security: SSH (familiar with the SSH 2 protocol), OpenPGP, Kerberos, network security, NaCl/libsodium
Home LAN: since 2000, various configurations; previously connected to a semi-private experimental overlay meta-network using OpenVPN and the Quagga BGP daemon
Healthcare IT: HL7, some Meditech Magic, some McKesson STAR
Telephony: Asterisk VoIP (multiple deployments); some 2G GSM/GPRS (layers 2 and 3)
IP networking: troubleshooting, security, routing, firewalls, VPNs, IPv6, DNSSEC
Source control systems: Git, Mercurial Subversion, CVS, Perforce, Bazaar (bzr)
Databases: MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, some CouchDB
Web technologies: Ruby on Rails, HTTP, DOM XML, Python WSGI, Pylons, OAuth, OpenID, some Flash

Interests

Especially interested in high-impact work that is aligned with the public interest. Examples include (but not limited to):

anti-corruption, transparency initiatives
free/open-source software (FOSS)
improving access to education
improving access to technology, including general-purpose computing
improving usability of cryptography for ordinary end-users (e.g. novel approaches to key management)
improving usability of cryptography for ordinary software developers (e.g. reducing complexity of APIs and implementations)
open access to scientific research
network neutrality, software patent reform, and other initiatives to level the playing field
trustworthy computing, reliable computing, solving the malware problem
ubiquitous cryptography