Personal Information
- Name: Rod Kestler
- Date of birth: 11 June
- Nationality: Citizen of United States
- Address: 10 Bounty Road East, Benbrook, TX 76132, United States
- Phone: (469) 751-7818
- Email: rod@hatchinnovations.com
- PDF Resume: PDF Resume
Professional Profile
Writing software started for me at the age of eleven. I wrote games for fun, but then became fascinated with storage and data retrieval when I exhausted the memory of my Commodore 64. My interest moved on into graphics, rendering and video special effects, but ultimately came back to system design and the theory of systems in general. All of this would come together as I became a consultant and started working on manufacturing interfaces, control suites and visualization tools.
I spent my early years cutting my teeth in a product development shop that produced a 24x7 middle-ware system. It was my first major experience with fully distributed, mission critical applications. During those days, I was a 100% C++ purist, but soon I would be invited to go to work for Stingray Software, a premier C++ component vendor, and they had the Microsoft .NET framework a full year before the world would see even a beta build. C# wasn't even called C# at that time. And from that point, I began devouring every aspect of .NET development - web development, Windows Forms, and then finally Windows Presentation Foundation, DirectX, and Silverlight.
In 2006, I formed my own company to help other companies incubate product offerings. This has been the primary focus on my work for the past ten years - to help people build complex systems.
Work Experience
April 2006 - Present
Principal Architect / Lead Developer
I started Hatch Innovations, LLC in 2006 and have worked with a wide array of technologies, frameworks, and clients. The vision behind Hatch was to focus on product incubation and system implementation for other companies - an idea which is encapsulated in the name of the company. We have been fortunate enough to work with some large companies, such as:
- Microsoft Bing and Silverlight Teams
- 20th Century Fox / Moxie Interactive (Two movie trailer sites)
- Georgia Pacific (Two complex HMI systems - see portfolio)
- Sun Microsystems (prior to Oracle purchase)
- Two separate social networking sites for start-ups
- Wintellect (multiple projects)
November 2005 - April 2006
Director of Development
Moxie Interactive
Started as an architect and was quickly placed on the Verizon Get It Now™ global store front project, which was in trouble at the time. Using a hand-picked team of internal developers and my extensive knowledge of distributed systems, networking and scalability (from previous years working in industrial middle-ware), I was able to turn the project around and save the client relationship, following some brutal weeks of working and burning midnight oil. I was promoted to Director of Development following that project, but ultimately ended up leaving because it was clear that I had transitioned into a nearly 100% management role.
- Led a team and implemented much of Verizon's Get It Now™ global store site - a massive scaling ASP.NET site
- Worked in a multi-media rich environment with integrations with dedicated designers and lots of advanced Flash media
- Learned a great deal about leadership, and how to properly scope and manage large projects
June 2003 - June 2005
Senior Web Software Architect
NC Department of Health and Human Services, Raleigh, NC
Served as an architect for the State of North Carolina’s experimental web architecture team. This involved designing a comprehensive suite of application SOA services, with web UI plugins (i.e. custom web control plugins) which allowed developers to snap in services to applications, which required nothing more than CSS and configuration shells.
- DocStore: A SharePoint competitor, but with less bloat and better performance – SQL Server / Web Service based with its own indexing services for most MS Office documents.
- WIRM(Web Identity Role Management): This was our single-sign-on IPrincipal platform that we used for A&A for all our SOA modules. I helped build this with a talented guy named Jake Morgan, who is now CTO of Elsinore Technologies.
- Mentor, DateKeeper, Trainer: In keeping with our modular, SOA strategy, these were additional systems which provided on-line help, calendars, and training scheduling.
- DAFI: (DHHS Application Framework Interface): In addition to the enterprise systems listed above, we maintained a base framework for the entire division to use, which was a creation of myself and Jake Morgan.
August 2002 - June 2003
Senior Architect / Lead Developer
Spectrabyte, LLC
Established a corporation to continue advanced web development and to more efficiently deal with my expanding client base. The corporation has focused on development of web sites, commerce sites, and mobile Pocket PC applications. In addition, development of a user interface library, designed to be a replacement for MFC has been underway, as well as a hierarchical data storage engine, and a team based web development studio.
- Developed an enterprise level mobile sale force automation application targeted for the Pocket PC 2002 platform, using a combination of eMbedded VB and eMbedded C++ components, and SQL Server CE, and a back-end system running on SQL Server 2000, SAP and XTND Connect.
- Built two advanced commerce sites, including features such as custom document generation, work flow and approval engines, document routing, and kit products – technologies used were ASP, COM+ (ATL) business objects, SQL Server 2000 and BizTalk Server 2000
- Developed an advanced Web-based Survey Engine, capable of delivering interactive media content to participants for a local medical research company – technologies used were ASP, COM+ (ATL) business objects, SQL Server 2000
NOTE: For all products listed I am the designer, architect and lead developer.
- Canvas XE: Developed a skinned replacement for MFC that relies on custom windows message loops, STL and a thinner approach to a windows library, using templates, and design patterns.
- HydraStore:Developing a hierarchical data storage engine to use as a generic document server. The product, which is in development now, supports versioning, and uses “type factory” objects to create default instances of object types declared by the application. A Custom IDispatch implementation is used to make collection member access transparent in automation and scripting clients.
- SpiderXE:This code editor/IDE product was designed to use both the Canvas XE UI library and the Hydrastore Lite version of Hydrastore (see above) to provide code versioning and code pattern storage.
August 2002 - June 2003
Senior Software Engineer / Project Lead
Datanet-Pomeroy
Hired to build a complete commerce system; Requirements included shopping, pricing, sales and marketing statistical stats and control, Internet-based work flow and document routing, kit product engine and asset tracking. Some web interfaces were down-leveled for the Compaq iPaq Pocket PC device. Completed the first version in September of 2002.
Continued work on internal project-oriented consulting accounts, including the following:
- BizTalk 2000 integration for Toshiba Battery Pack of America
- Custom Financial Portal for First Union (Built on Microsoft .NET, C#)
Also served as a general resource for setting the direction and nature of web technologies employed by the company’s Advanced Systems Group (ASG). This included making decisions, generating plans and implementing advanced web technologies involving XML, DHTML, and other technologies such as VS.NET, ASP.NET and C#, and some classic ASP.
Mentored junior developers in the usage of standard Web Technologies, usage of Microsoft language tools, VS .NET jumpstarting, XML technology usage and development, general development skills and help with debugging.
May 2000 - May 2001
Senior Software Engineer
Stingray Software (A Division of Rogue Wave)
Stingray was an advanced product development company of the late 1990's which produced Visual C++ components and tools for MFC developers on the Windows platform. In essence, they were the Telerik of C++ during that decade.
Hired as a Senior Developer to develop and mentor junior developers during the Internet Dispatcher product development phase. Implemented early prototypes, the integrated development environment, web-based application for the product (DHTML/Advanced JavaScript GUI with some server-side COM+ Objects which proxy the debug session and user-preferences), in beta 1 and beta 2 versions of Microsoft’s .NET platform (C# Language).
I also was one the lead developers for the client API which ran on Windows CE (iPaq, HP Jornada, Vadem Clio devices), and was implemented as a Win32 DLL for use by MFC client applications and was developed with Embedded Visual C++. This component was a custom socket API that had the overall capability of picking up inbound payloads from the server’s DSR (Device Service Registry) layer.
Internet Dispatcher was essentially a server product that could abstract push and pull protocol situations to a single logical endpoint, for the purpose of making Wireless and PDA web applications easier to build. The server-side component was written with Visual C++ and Microsoft’s ATL Server. During this project, the VP and Director of Marketing were so impressed with the IDE for Internet Dispatcher that they asked me to become the web master for the external and internal sites.
During the Internet Dispatcher project, senior management was so impressed with my DHTML and Javascript capabilities, that they asked me to become the webmaster for the company and lead a team of web developers in building the new version of the public site at www.stingray.com, plus the secondary Wireless development site at www.flextalk.com, along with www.devuniverse.com. One prototype of stingray.com, featured a DHTML implemented portal, high quality rollover menus, user selectable site skins, and advanced database driven content. The entire site is configurable via a desktop application, written in MSVB 6.0, and used a User-Role-Rule system to allow each person in the company to edit only the parts of the web site for which they have been granted access. (The prototype was unfinished, due to lay-offs, and was only designed to work in Internet Explorer) The site’s data repository is built on SQL Server 2000, and earlier prototypes ran on SQL Server 7.5.
Successfully implemented a new Web Lead system, which increased sales traffic by more than 250% and resulted in dramatic gains in the sales bottom line. Implemented an Intranet application, implemented entirely with DHTML and server-side ASP code to access, maintain and report against the lead data. Reporting engine used was Crystal Reports 7.0, along with some standard Web Reports, which were implemented as XML streams from Web Services built with SOAP Toolkit version 1.0, ASP and standard XSLT transformations. This Web-based application also has a site admin application written in MSVB 6.0.
Successfully implemented a new Web Lead system, which increased sales traffic by more than 250% and resulted in dramatic gains in the sales bottom line. Implemented an Intranet application, implemented entirely with DHTML and server-side ASP code to access, maintain and report against the lead data. Reporting engine used was Crystal Reports 7.0, along with some standard Web Reports, which were implemented as XML streams from Web Services built with SOAP Toolkit version 1.0, ASP and standard XSLT transformations. This Web-based application also has a site admin application written in MSVB 6.0.
I also served as a general web architect for the company, driving directions and designs for new products, such as Objective Web Toolkit and Objective Toolkit for DHTML. I employed various powerful web technologies such as XML, XSLT, SOAP protocol web services, and helped the company develop its initiative to migrate current C++ based desktop applications to Microsoft .NET web service-enabled systems.
Mentored junior developers in the usage of COM/DCOM/ATL DirectX, general OO and C++ development techniques and practices.
Served as the in-house reference for SAP integration during the Sapphire 2000 demonstration initiative in 2000. (Most of my knowledge of SAP is now out-dated)
August 1998 - April 2000
Senior Software Engineer / Lead Developer
iWork, LLC
Served as a lead developer and architect of a line the distributed data collection and delivery products called dcServ, including major overhaul of dcEngine 2.2A and 2.3, re-education of the primary software development staff in techniques for improving database access, code performance, threading, memory management and better OOD/OOA practices. Improved the company's entire system of product delivery by developing a wrap and release process. This led to advances in QA practices, version control and an expansion of the QA department.
Authored a complete generic, thread-safe Database access library/DLL, which was used in all products that perform database access by the company. Object library enabled mapping of databases, standard and dynamic rowset operations, statement-based SQL actions and was compliant with the ODBC 3.0 API specification. Library was capable of copying tables and views from one database to another, of dumping and running SQL Scripts, and could create and drop tables in any of the five DBMS’ supported (SQL Server 6.5/7.0, Oracle 7.X.X/8i, Sybase Adv. Server, IBM DB/2 (UDB) for Windows NT (v5.0), and MS Access 97/2000). All of the functionality was available via an object model, and I have since written a new COM version, which is far superior in capability.
Designed and developed a complete replacement for the company's product licensing system, using a COM license runtime object, written with ATL, an MFC-based key management App, and a static InstallShield support library. Key containers for this system used RSA RC4 for hash generation, and EDES for symmetric encryption. The product is called dcLock and was used internally for licensing all iWork Software products.
Prompted by management’s request for a “Kai-look” for the upcoming Aurora Framework project, I developed a custom Window Library for the Client UI called XGUI, which features many custom MFC Window and Control Classes and a sophisticated Application object capable of delivering HTML Help, of loading external UNICODE language DLLs, built-in Splash, About Box and error recovery system and many more features.
It has slick, black dialogs, dozens of custom controls and a Connector View that uses design patterns, advanced vector algebra and can be extended to do just about anything. XGUI runs on top of a GDI engine that draws many complex primitives, such as gradient and radial fills, bitmap fills and complex gadgets.
Designed a complete distributed Work Flow Design and control system called dcExecutive (part of the current Aurora Framework product development project). The system features a multi-user DCOM Server Farm (3 ATL implemented Free-Threaded servers) and a concurrent Win32 Client. The dcExecutive Client itself has a VISIO-like connector view, which allows Applications which publish Metadata to the framework to participate in User-defined workflow. Workflow compiler creates Java objects, which can execute other Java-based business objects, such as EJB’s or can be used in web environments, such as within JSP’s, decision control and XML/XSLT based DOM-to-DOM data transformation services. Compiled Java was then downloaded to a JNI enabled Business Process Engine which delivers XML-based message data across asynchronous Queue-to-Queue connections and synchronous socket-based connection protocols. I built two of the DCOM servers and the client GUI and custom MFC library (see XGUI, above), and designed everything, including the Metadata architecture and specifications. This product made it to market and was called Enterprise Frameworks. All the DCOM Servers were tested using MSVB 5.0 and 6.0, which was my standard practice for testing COM/DCOM and COM+ objects.
May 1996 - August 1998
Consultant / Developer
METRO Information Systems
Worked on a variety of contract positions with clients ranging from Champion, Sara Lee Hosiery, Tultex and others. Developed business solution objects, servers and applications using languages and tools ranging from Visual Basic 4-5, MS Visual C++ 4-5 and DEC VMS C and Assembly.
Designed and Implemented an automated Knit-To-Lot real-time management system which integrated with SAP. System linked live to Dye Vessel automation software and featured a virtual lot scheduling application and an automated strand balancing application.
Used Visual Basic 5.0 for the front-ends, coupled with a DCOM server written with ATL/VStudio 5.0, three custom ATL-based ActiveX controls, and an Oracle Database running on an Alpha 2600 Digital (DEC) UNIX box.
Co-Designed and implemented a suite of BOM admin and maintenance applications. Applications were written in MS VB 4.0 and used a C++ DLL written in MSVC++ (MFC 4.0) for encapsulation of common business rules. I wrote the DLL and ten to twelve of the seventeen+ apps in the entire planned suite. Data was served from Oracle 7.2.3 DBMS on multiple HPUX servers.
Designed and implemented a multi-user Insurance Quoting and Tracking console for the entire company to use. Client was written in VB 4.0, and used a C++ DLL for encapsulation of math and business function calls.
Education
1994-1996
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Major: Computer Science
Attended UNC-G after leaving the US Army in 1991, and a brief stint as a special effects designer / programmer. Initially I majored in archaeology, but changed to computer sciences due to a change in interest level.
1988
US Air Force School of Still and Digital Imaging, Aurora CO
Honor Graduate, class 880504
I did a 3 year tour of duty in the US Army as a still photographer, and as such was trained at a US Air Force school in Aurora, Colorado. I learned just about everything one can learn about film, development chemistry, view cameras, copy cameras, SLR and medium format cameras, lenses, lighting, slide chemistry, slide printing (R3), color printing and development, portrait photography, photo-journalism, and forensic photography. I was also honor graduate of my class.
References
Corey Schuman
Director of Development, BDO Atlanta
I worked with Corey when he was the Technical Architect for Razorfish's Emerging Experiences team. He and I had met during the AT&T; Store of the Future project and when he then hand picked me to write a custom networking component for the Bridgestone Store of the Future project. Corey has since moved on to greater challenges with BDO, but he and maintain a friendship and often talk about technology, psychology and leadership dynamics.
Jason Ramsey
Manager of IT, Georgia-Pacific
I worked with Jason on two major projects for Georgia-Pacific - the OASIS HMI (Human Machine Interface) system, and the ACORN IoT Sensor Management platform. I am the designer and lead developer for both of these systems, and as such I have interfaced with Jason and his large team of developers for extended periods of time and concerning complex implementations. Jason is one of my "favorite human beings" of all time. He is an honorable, honest, positive and courageous person without fail.
NOTE: For privacy purposes, contact information for references will be given out only upon request.
Technical Skills
C/C++
Expert, 20+ years
I began as a C/C++ developer and I remain fluent with this language. Though I do not see call or need for it often, I did revise and fix an Active/X control for Georgia-Pacific within the last two years, and I have my own projects, including one to port large portions of the .NET framework to C++, using a smart pointer system.
C# / .NET Framework
Expert, 16 years
As previously mentioned, I worked at Stingray software and had access to C# before the language was even called C#. I typically have one more year of experience than even the most immersed .NET developers, aside from those who worked at Stingray or similar companies. I have deep experience (decompilation, IL, immersive knowledge of the framework classes) in framework versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, 4.5.1 and 4.5.2. I have worked with most core framework sub-technologies extensively, including ADO.NET, WPF, WCF and GDI+. I have been fortunate enough to be in situations where I had to implement some of the most challenging systems possible with .NET.
Javascript
Advanced, 10 years
Even as early as Stingray, I was getting into XML-RPC and advanced DOM manipulation. I have framework level knowledge of Javascript - meaning that I can write Javascript frameworks, control libraries and reusable behaviors form scratch. And in fact, some of my frameworks predate the jQuery/AJAX explosion we are currently seeing.
Html5 & Css3
Advanced, 4 years
I have always kept my web skills sharp, even though I typically am employed for larger scale system design and implementation. I can implement just about kind of feature or behavior in modern web systems, including responsive design, frameworks, custom CSS frameworks/layout vocabularies, fixed or relative grid systems, advanced typography and media queries.
Database Systems
Expert, 20 years
While my experience lies outside large scale OLTP type scenarios, I have a solid knowledge of ANSI SQL, Microsoft's T-SQL, and I have implemented low-level frameworks and direct access to several different major RDBMS platforms, including SQL Server 6.0, 6.5, 7.0, 2000 through 2012, Oracle 7.X.X through 11, early versions of Sybase, and IBM DB/2. See portfolio, SQL Object for details. In most modern situations, where managed code was the primary language, I have designed, managed and implemented the entire data schema on many projects - or at minimum oversaw and managed the aspect of development. I also have the unique and fortunate luxury of having worked in some very high scalability situations (Verizon Get It Now™, iWork's dcServ)
jQuery
Advanced, 4 years
Though I do not memorize every single API and application of jQuery, I do know how to use it and what it can do, and I can use it fluidly in most situations. I can also write plugins for it, when need be.
Angular
Advanced, 2 years
Following the demise of Silverlight, as well as my own pre-existing interest in both Javascript-based data binding, templating, and custom control development, I have learned Angular as a practical means of increasing the speed and efficiency of web development. I have used it exclusively in one large scale, commercial project (Athletes On social networking site - see portfolio). While I don't consider myself to be an Angular expert, I can implement more advanced aspects, such as custom services and directives.
Graphics Rendering / DirectX / GDI+ / XNA
Advanced, 8 years
I have always had an interest in high-performance graphics. I have worked extensively with very advanced GDI (complete owner-drawn frameworks in C++ and C#), DirectX (video capture suite for Wintellect, 2008), game UI frameworks (personal project using XNA) and other applications (e.g. large format video wall for EWI)
Contact
If you wish to contact me about working on a project of you own or manage, please use the form below to send me an email. I only work corp-to-corp through Hatch Innovations, LLC, but I will come onsite, and I will serve as a team lead, architect, or a lead developer on any team. I can work with existing teams, build teams, or work solo to implement entire systems.
Benbrook TX 76132, United States of America
Tel: +1 404 889 7965
E-mail: rod@hatchinnovations.com