Bradley T. Penoff's Resume

THIS IS A VERY OLD RESUME. FOR THE LATEST INFO, SEE MY LINKEDIN PAGE!!!

Bradley T. Penoff
fax: +1 801 659 8515
email: penoff.1 at osu.edu
citizenship: United States
work visa: Republic of Ireland
student visa: Canada

SEEKING CHALLENGING POSITION IN THE COMPUTER SCIENCE FIELD TO BOTH GAIN
JOB EXPERIENCES AND BUILD A RELATIONSHIP WITH AN EMPLOYER.

Education:

Master's degree (MSc.)
University of British Columbia - August 2003 -
Specialization: Parallel Computing
- "A" average
- Taught 2 terms of introductory C++ course
Breif class listing
Bachelor's degree (BSc.)
The Ohio State University - September 1997 - June 2001
Major: BSE in Computer Science and Engineering with distinction *
Minors: International Relations, Computational Linguistics
- GPA: 3.42 (4.0 scale)
- Averaged 20+ credit hours/quarter (12 hours = full time student, 14 - 17 hours = typical load)
- Winner of Engineering College's 2000 Lumley research scholarship. Awarded full-year tuition.
- Participated in DIS study abroad program in Denmark in Autumn 2000.
- UnderLings Vice President (undergraduate Linguistics club)
Full class descriptions with grades are available upon request.
High School Honors Diploma
Pickerington High School - May 1997
- GPA: 3.75 (4.0 scale)
- Varsity Soccer team captain
- 1996-97 Chess club president, 1997 school champion
- National Honor Society member, various science club memberships
- 1996 Mousetrap race distance champion

Statement:

My knowledge, at this point, lies mostly in software development. I'm fluent in Perl, C/C++, and Java and I have experience with some other languages as well (Python, Tkl/Expect, LISP/Scheme, Prolog, ksh, basic HTML, Makefiles, etc.). I also spent a fare share of time testing software conducting both manual testing as well as test automation development. Also, I have experience with basic system administration tasks on multiple platforms.

Starting in August 2003, I began pursuit towards a MSc in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I am focusing on parallel computing. This is a two year program.

For my most recent industry job at Sun Microsystems, I worked in Dublin, Ireland. There I both gained work experience and life experience living in another culture. There I played a variety of roles. Initially, I worked in software development for some education software for one of our products. For our last project, which is a complex blade server (Sun Fire B1600) initially released in early 2003, I started out in development having done several training courses on tools for developing embedded systems. Later, I played more of a testing role. With this, I've also been the point of contact for lab issues other testers have experienced, so I also have obtained the skills of a Unix system administrator. Later, I led our test automation efforts. Responsibilities with this ran the full range, from requirements gathering to software design to implementation to documentation to packaging to support.

In my spare time, when I'm not traveling or watching/playing soccer, I've been working on a software project with some friends . With that, I've been doing various work in Java, C and Perl as well as co-administrating our Apache web server and several various other admin-like tasks (NFS, DNS, mysql, etc.). I've also been looking into all sorts of web technologies like PHP, CGI, server-side includes, Java Servlets, etc. in order to find which would potentially fit into possible this and other parts of our project. Additionally, I'm the gatekeeper for our CVS server. This project is very much at the beginning but essentially we are looking at it as a forum to learning all sorts of new technologies while working on something we are genuinely interested in.

At college (The Ohio State University), I took classes in systems programming, several on operating systems (general concepts, also 2 course lab sequence), parser/interpreter design, hardware design (more specifically, the MIPS architecture), file structures (file organization, basic relational database introduction), algorithm analysis as well as a course on finite automata and formal languages (useful for parser/compiler design). Our entire degree was taught on the Unix platform. I held jobs at school for several years as both a lab consultant and a researcher, in addition to multiple summer internships.

As an undergraduate, I took several classes in Linguistics as well. These classes were about syntactic and semantic theory mostly so the underlying basics were quite similar to theoretical computer science. In order to get the opportunity to work in Computational Linguistics, I did my senior honors thesis under the guidance of computational linguist Chris Brew. In the fall of my senior year, I couldn't fully devote my time to this project until after I returned from studying the Danish language and culture in Copenhagen, Denmark in January 2001. I submitted my thesis for a portion of our research but work on our topic continued following my graduation in June 2001. In fact, I worked on implementing a prototype of our XML query language (TREX-Q) and we presented a co-authored paper at the NSF sponsored IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases based on this research. This was in December 11-13, 2001 in Philadelphia (abstract). The key contribution in this work was providing a general formula to go from an XML verification language to an XML query language. The details were published in the conference proceedings.

Publication:

Penoff, Brad and Chris Brew. "TREX-Q: A Query Language based on XML Schema". Proceedings for IRCS Workshop on Linguistic Databases, 2001, p 200-209. [pdf]

Professional Experience:

C++ Teaching Assistant, University of British Columbia, September 2003 - present
Vancouver, BC, CANADA

Volume Systems Products Software Engineer, Sun Microsystems, July 2001 - August 2003
Dublin, Ireland

Designed, documented, implemented (in Perl and ksh), and tested a series of tools to easily add a batch of users to our product's system.
Two weeks of Solaris 8 System Administration training.
Tornado 2/VxWorks 5.4 Workshop (used for embedded, real-time processing)
Worked both with the development team and also with the QA team so I got to better appreciate work that goes on in different parts of a development cycle
Assistant with various system administration tasks (NIS, tftp, Jumpstart, subnet setup, NFS, etc.)
Working on the blade server project (Sun Fire B1600) from start to finish has helped clarify the full engineering product cycle as well as familiarizing myself with all the various components/firmwares and their respective technologies
Led test automation suite efforts. Responsibilities with this have ran the full range, from requirements gathering to software design to implementation to documentation to packaging to support.
Developed multiple test tools in C, Perl, and expect

SunRay 1.3 Team Internship, Sun Microsystems , June 2000 - August 2000
Menlo Park, California, USA

Participated in collaborative coding efforts (SMMS, code review, bugtraq, etc.).
Generated X-configuration API for our product from given specs.
Researched OpenSSL, modssl for use with Apache web server in our product.
Wrote formal specifications for adding generic naming service backends to our product's naming switch (so any naming service could be used with it).
Implemented backends (NIS, NIS+, File, LDAP) in C particular to our product together with Makefiles.

Network Computer Systems Internship, Sun Microsystems , June 1999 - September 1999
Menlo Park, California, USA

Developed and presented an array of Java programs for testing proper input/output of international characters
Learned the basics of X11, GTK, Qt, and Motif/Xt when researching a particular product
Learned the details of a proprietary management console toolkit and helped update older code to meet this new toolkit's standards
Experienced how an engineering firm's processes (i.e. code reviews, walkthroughs, QA, etc.) truly worked and gained invaluable life experience being in Silicon Valley

UNIX Lab Consultant, The CIS Department at The Ohio State University, December 1998 - January 2001
Columbus, Ohio, USA

Gave UNIX/programming support to CIS students in the public labs
Learned a wide variety of UNIX commands/tools
Became conscience of common hang-ups in Computer Science

Researcher, The CIS Department at The Ohio State University (Europa research team), September 1998 - June 2001
Columbus, Ohio, USA

Worked mostly in a cooperative team environment. This would involve both sharing code and sharing project related insights learned from independent research.
Worked on a Java project that supplied a graphical workbench for students in the introductory course sequence at OSU
Developed essential presentation skills and skills in participating in open forums

PC Software Support Technician, Lucent Technologies, June 1998 - September 1998
Columbus, Ohio, USA

Supported 5000+ PC users with various problems on Windows desktop applications, Internet dilemmas, and new user concerns
Worked with NT4 Server, NT4 Workstations, Windows95, and dealt with multiple UNIX terminal emulators running on top of Windows
Troubleshot network and hardware failures
Worked in the upwards of 67 hour work weeks during peak. No sick days.

Help Desk Operator, BISYS Fund Services, January 1997 - May 1997 volunteer through high school mentorship program; May 1997 - July 1997 on wages
Columbus, Ohio, USA

Responsible to run the computer help line.
Provided support on basic windows applications. Am familiar with different network clients such as NT 3.51, NT 4, and Novel NetWare.
Templated new computers so that they could see the network and use applications.
Diagnosed network and hardware errors. Familiar with hubs and the networking concept.
Worked 50+ hour weeks. Punctual. No sick days.

Stock Room Worker, JCPenney Outlet Store, December 1994 - November 1996
Columbus, Ohio, USA

Unloaded semi-trucks filled with returned merchandise from all around the nation.
Put together floor samples of entertainment centers, cabinets, etc.
Loaded purchased items into customers cars.
Perfect attendance.

Center Referee / Linesman, Mid-Ohio Select Soccer League, Spring 1993 - June 2001
greater Columbus, Ohio, USA

Responsible for making calls in soccer games and, at the same time, ensuring safety for the players.
Required commutes of up to 45 minutes at times for this seasonal job.

Hobbies:

Soccer, computers, computer games, programming, music, travel, chess, piano, reading (non-fiction science books mostly), ultimate frisbee, frisbee golf, learning languages, hiking, wind-surfing, cooking, fusball, ping-pong, basketball.

References:

Available upon request.

* = Graduating "with distinction" means that you maintained honors status with a 3.4 GPA AND wrote a senior thesis. Click here to go back to where this asterisk was.