Thomas D. Childers

Website Architect

I love complex projects and systems, and have a 30-year track record of building sophisticated commercial software and websites on time and on budget. I am an experienced manager, capacity planner and performance analyst.

Professional Experience

Currently working on projects for Asset Strategies International, Tanya Constantine Photography, and others.

Most recently, I completed implementation of a new website for Import Tile Co., in Berkeley, CA. This project included complete site design and implementation, authorship of all marketing content, image processing, slideshow creation, plus IT support and operations management.

I was the lead engineer and program manager for the Forté product suite, providing architectural, configuration and tuning support for mission-critical systems at MCI Worldcom, Telefónica de España, Lufthansa, Bank of America, the US Department of Defense, and dozens of other major customers.

I created a website infrastructure to facilitate product sales and support. I ran and published benchmarks on the largest Sun systems to help document the most reliable and high-performing large system configurations.

I was also chair and member for many years of the OpenSolaris Architecture Review Committee. These reviews help to standardize product installation and configuration, and improve serviceability to reduce engineering cost and effort.

I joined Forté in 1997 to port the product suite to IBM zOS, and we completed this difficult project within six months. This was one of the first generic Unix products ported to the UNIX System Services environment, and IBM published my porting recommendations on their web site for several years. I benchmarked product performance for a large financial customer at IBM Poughkeepsie, and presented the results at IBM and Forté technical conferences.

I worked on the generic Open Client and Open Server products, with a focus on the IBM mainframe platform. I was the architect and member of the implementation team for the company's CORBA and Java Transaction Services support, helped establish standards and guidelines for source code management in the ClearCase environment, and was a major contributor to the engineering organization’s ISO 9000 certification.

My career with Oracle began with handling all database performance issues on IBM MVS. I designed, configured, optimized and ran several benchmarks per week, evaluating competitive performance against DB2 and exposing database kernel issues. As Oracle 6 became a stable product, I focused increasingly on customer and field support, developing and teaching classes in Oracle/IBM product architecture and performance. I presented technical papers at most IOUG conferences, and wrote numerous articles for Oracle Magazine.

I joined this startup company to help create the DB2 Remote Recovery Data Facility. We completed the implementation (in System/390 Assembler), end-to-end testing and documentation in 6 months. I am the holder (with the company founders) of software patent 5,412,801.

In the mid-1980’s, I co-founded a Silicon Valley startup to build COBOL re-engineering tools. The company later went public and become Viasoft (now a part of ASG). In 1986, I started a successful consulting business, with projects at IBM, Levi Strauss & Co., and others. At IBM, I led a team of consultants and employees to architect, design and implement one of the first worldwide distributed relational database systems.

Professional Associations

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Computer Sciences (IEEE/CS)
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)

Education

Undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering and Geophysics.

Publications

A selection of white papers, presentations and magazine articles can be viewed here.

References

Available upon request. See my profile on LinkedIn.com.