Thomas D. Childers

Software Engineering Manager/Architect

I love complex projects and large systems, and have a great track record of building high-performance software on time and on budget. I lead from the middle, mentor well, and create a flexible and dynamic team environment. I’m a very experienced performance analyst and capacity planner. I’ve written and ported millions of lines of code across all kinds of platforms, patented real-time database replication technology, and have participated in open source development for years.

Professional Experience

Senior development manager, responsible for performance management and capacity planning.

Member and chair of the Architecture Review Committee for Solaris middleware like Glassfish, Java CAPS and NetBeans. 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.

Ported the complete product suite to IBM zOS Unix Services in six months, then enhanced the application integration and workflow products to improve multithreading performance (IBM published my porting recommendations on their web site for years). Also benchmarked product performance for a large financial customer at IBM Poughkeepsie, and presented the results at IBM and Forté technical conferences.

Led the team porting Open Client and Open Server 10 to IBM mainframes, and I later worked on the generic middleware products, as architect and member of the implementation team for the company's CORBA and Java Transaction Services support. Also a major contributor to the engineering organization’s ISO 9000 certification.

Performance engineer responsible for all database performance issues on IBM MVS. Designed, optimized and ran benchmarks to evaluate competitive performance against DB2 and expose database kernel issues. Presented technical papers at most IOUG conferences, and wrote articles for Oracle Magazine.

Co-architect of the IBM DB2 Remote Recovery Data Facility, and the underlying ENET1 product. Co-holder (with the company founders) of software patent 5,412,801.

I began my career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, programming scientific and commercial applications on an IBM mainframe. From 1979 through 1983, I did similar work at Fireman's Fund Insurance Companies.

In 1984, I co-founded a Silicon Valley startup (Viasoft), then consulted at IBM Santa Teresa, Levi Strauss, and others. At IBM, I led a team to architect, design and implement one of the first worldwide distributed relational database systems, managing documentation processes across 72 international sites.

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.