Donovan Baarda

Name:

Donovan Baarda

Address:

Apt 101, 77 Pembroke Road
Ballsbridge
Dublin D4
Ireland

Home:

+353 1 658 7839

Work:

+353 1 543 1238

Mobile:

+353 86 858 9128

Email:

abo@minkirri.apana.org.au

Summary:

Any interesting work as a consultant, software engineer, or systems administrator in the IT industry, utilizing my broad range of technical skills and experience in systems design, development, testing, and support.

Institution:

RMIT

City/Country:

Melbourne, Australia

Qualifications:

Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Science.
Completed after switching from Aerospace Engineering.

Completed:

1992

Institution:

RMIT

City/Country:

Melbourne, Australia

Qualifications:

Bachelor of Engineering in Aerospace Engineering (3/4 complete).
Switched to Computer Science before completion.

Completed:

1990

Start Date:

May 2005

End Date:

Currently Employed

Position/Title:

Site Reliability Engineer

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• A mixture of large scale System Administration and Software Engineering supporting the Google Production Ads System, including oncall support, new cluster buildouts, and development of support software.

• Working in a team to ensure 99.999% availability of the Google Ads Serving system.

• Interviewing of potential employees for SRE and other related positions.

Start Date:

Nov 2002

End Date:

May 2005

Position/Title:

Contractor/Software Engineer

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Contracted doing customer specific customisations for the Python/Zope based Jet Billing System (see http://jet.obsidian.com.au/).

• Contracted doing fill-in RedHat System Administration support for a hosting company with a temporary staff shortfall.

• Employed as a Software Engineer for a large contract developing a Python/Zope based document management system for the Victorian State Government's planning schemes.

• Worked in a team using Agile and Extreme Programming development methodologies (see http://www.extremeprogramming.org/).

Start Date:

May 2002

End Date:

Jan 2003

Position/Title:

Intermittent contracting and misc follow-up support.

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Provided development assistance for a Warlpirri language learning project using Macromedia Director 8 on Mac OS9 (project journal available at http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/projects/wilr/swf/wilr.diary).

• Ported, tested, and debugged the project for Win32 platforms.

• Mastered, tested, and produced a CD of the project for both Mac and Win32.

Start Date:

Apr 2002

End Date:

May 2002

Position/Title:

Two week contract

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Negotiated contract milestones and payments with overseas company on line.

• Ported a Linux application and library to MSVC++ and contributed patch upstream.

• Developed a Python extension module for Linux and Win32 using gcc and MSVC++ (available at http://freshmeat.net/projects/pysync/).

• Co-ordinated and recorded development on line (project journal available at http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/projects/pysync/swf/pysync.diary).

Start Date:

Sep 1997

End Date:

Currently Active

Position/Title:

Melbourne Regional Coordinator/Hub Administrator (unpaid volunteer)

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Elected Regional Coordinator 1999-2001.

• Negotiated for more regional autonomy within APANA National.

• Coordinated and introduced volume billing system.

• Introduced delegation and training for hub administration through helpers and secondaries system.

• Administered annex 4000 terminal server.

• Administered squid web proxy.

• Sourced/purchased new hardware.

• Installed/maintained Linux servers.

• Co-ordinated/ordered/configured new phone/ISDN connections.

Start Date:

Jul 1995

End Date:

Currently Active

Position/Title:

Network Administrator (unpaid hobby)

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Administered a small Internet Public Access site with 3 dial in lines and 15-30 subscribers.

• Installed and supported a LAN with 3-6 mixed win9x, Linux, and Mac workstations.

• Ordered/configured/supported upstream and downstream connectivity (ISDN DOV, phones, mgetty, etc).

• Administered Linux servers (apache, zope, postfix, postgres, nfs, samba, nntp, dhcp, snmp, proftpd, ntpd, dns, squid, xfs, etc).

• Administered dual boot win9x/Linux workstations. (win9x, Debian, MSOffice, gnome, etc).

• Provided phone support to dial in clients using Linux, Windows, and Mac.

Start Date:

Nov 1994

End Date:

Dec 2001

Position/Title:

System Engineer

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Worked on Nulka hovering rocket project now accepted into service by Australian, United-States, and Canadian Navies.

• Contributed to early stages of requirements analysis for the Nulka Fire Control System (FCS).

• Wrote several FCS interface requirements specifications using a variety of requirements management tools.

• Communicated and explained FCS interface requirements to the Canadian Navy for integration with their Naval Combat Data System.

• Analysed, designed, developed, and deployed PC based emulators and eavesdroppers (RS422, RS232, Synchro and NTDS interfaces) for the FCS System Integration and Simulation Facility (SISF),

• Acted as Design Authority for development and support of SISF emulators, eavesdroppers and the FCS NTDS interface.

• Analysed, designed, and developed real-time embedded software for Nulka ship-board test equipment using Rational, Ada and assembler (C3x, PIC).

• Developed PC based test equipment using Lab Windows and Python for validating ship-board test equipment.

• Designed and developed software for a PIC micro-controller Gyro Inbuilt Test System (GITS) retro-fitted to the Nulka Flight Control Unit (FCU) (nominated for an innovation award within BAE Systems).

• Performed design reviews, code walk-throughs, design changes, and configuration control, for projects using various tools written in Ada, C, C++, Pascal, and assembler (PIC, c3x, x86).

Start Date:

May 1993

End Date:

Oct 1994

Position/Title:

Software Engineer

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Analysed, designed, and developed character recognition stage of Japanese OCR system as part of a print-to-speech product.

• Invented, tuned, and applied AI learning algorithms on large datasets to produce recognition libraries for custom recognition hardware.

• Wrote C++ user interface program to aid development of a XT bus computer card.

• Designed and partially developed a Word Processor application with brail input and voice output for visually impaired users, using C and assembler (Z180).

Start Date:

Mar 1989

End Date:

Jul 1991

Position/Title:

Technical Officer/Contractor.

Responsibilities/Achievements:

• Coded, tested, and documented the Nulka Flight Control Unit (FCU) autopilot as part of a team of three, leading to successful trials at Woomera.

• Performed coding and unit testing in Z8002 assembler and Pascal to a formal specification.

• Wrote full documentation and maintained a complete design file to MIL STD 2176.

• Implemented, tested, and documented changes resulting from post-trials analysis.

• Performed a system reliability and test coverage analysis of the Nulka decoy.

Information available on request.

APESMA

English
Warlpirri (Central Australian Aboriginal Language)
German (High school)

Music (guitar, blues harp)

Active developer in the Python/Linux community. Projects include;
http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/projects/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pysync
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pyttymon
http://sourceforge.net/projects/librsync
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openadsl
http://sourceforge.net/projects/oedipus

Some additional information available online at http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/. Further information available on request.

Mal Crozier

Phone:

+61 3 9208 0511

Organisation/Position:

BAE Systems/Nulka Chief Designer

John Townsend

Phone:

+61 3 9208 0517

Organisation/Position:

BAE Systems/Project Manager

Kevin Littlejohn

Phone:

+61 3 9355 7844

Organisation/Position:

Obsidian Consulting Group/Senior Consultant