Kelvin Tan - Résumé

Overview

Profile: Independent Java Software Consultant

Skills: Experienced in listening to what clients need and translating business needs to technical requirements. Enjoys working independently, or as part of a team. Appreciates the importance of testing, documentation and training/mentoring. Fast and resourceful worker. Loves challenges. Certified ScrumMaster.

Willing to do what it takes to get the job done. Available for remote and onsite work, short assignments and long-term projects.

I am passionate about programming, work quickly and am persistent in finding solutions to complex problems.

Experience

PREVIOUS ROLES PLAYED:

Technical Lead and ScrumMaster of professional services software team - gathered requirements, performed design and facilitated project implementation using agile techniques.
Software Product Developer - designed and coded web-based document management application in Java.
Pre-sales Technical Consultant - addressed clients' technical concerns during product presentations, produced technical whitepapers, wrote tender documents and designed solutions that integrated with clients' existing IT infrastructure.
Build Bitch - managed build scripts, setup and maintained Ant, Anthill, Maven, CVS, SSH and Mailman on Linux.
Support Engineer - maintained and enhanced client's existing applications in Java, VBScript and PHP.
Website Administrator - single-handedly designed, setup and maintained PostNuke-based website.
Multimedia Courseware Designer - worked with clients to produce Computer-Based Training courseware, designing the graphics and scripting.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE:

5 years programming in Java.
Consulted for clients in healthcare, education, creative, hospitality/tourism, government and vertical search industries.
Knowledgeable in open-source software and licenses, in particular Jakarta Lucene, Velocity and WebWork2.
Hands-on system administration experience with Win2k and Linux (Red Hat/Mandrake) servers.
SQL development experience: Oracle, MS SQL Server, HSQL and MySQL.
Application/web server experience: Caucho Resin, Jakarta Tomcat, Apache Webserver, and Macromedia JRun.

Recent Work

Vertical search provider

Used: Java, Lucene, Nutch, Webwork2, Spring Framework, Hibernate

Services rendered:

Architected data aggregation and crawling processes
Customized Lucene's scoring mechanism to simplify explanation output
Designed/implemented full-cycle indexing/searching
Implemented site using Webwork-Spring-Hibernate MVC stack

Vertical search provider

Used: Java, Lucene, Nutch

Services rendered:

Customized Nutch to provide scalable site-specific crawling, implemented Nutch indexing and query filters
Added date sorting, Advanced Search functionality and content highlighting functionality to Nutch
Modified Lucene to provide a more expressive Explanation API

Vertical search provider

Used: Java, Lucene, PHP, XSLT

Services rendered:

Coded Javascript advanced search query constructor for Lucene.
"Did you mean..." spell-check feature
Tuned search relevance and query construction
Improved usability of web UI
Built Nutch-based crawler.

German Healthcare software provider

Used: Java, Spring Framework, Hibernate, WebWork2, SiteMesh, BeanShell, XMLHttpRequest

Services rendered:

Independently designed and implemented user management, authentication and authorization infrastructure.
Architected and developed the implementation of the TMF-data security concept (pdf) which requires extremely loose coupling between two applications to ensure patient data confidentiality is preserved. Used XMLHttpRequest to improve usability of application and reduce round trips between servers.
In addition to Hibernate and WebWork2, also used Spring Framework for bean wiring, remoting and mail.
Integrated WebWork2, SiteMesh and BeanShell for RAD.
Coordinated with the other developers in the team for smooth integration.
Test coverage of my non-web-related code was >90%.

Singaporean Knowledge Management software provider

Used: Java, Lucene, Velocity, Hibernate, WebDAV, WebWork 1.3, Avalon Framework (now defunct), Turbine Fulcrum, Torque

Services rendered:

Independently developed a Lucene-based search and indexing engine, features include support for distributed searching, pluggable file handling, indexes directories and URLs, indexes PDF, HTML, MS Office, ZIP, GZIP, TAR and XML files.
Extended WebWork and Velocity as framework layer, using Hibernate for persistence. It reduced development time of projects by ~3 weeks for a 3 month long project.
Wrote services framework based on Avalon Framework.
Developed various reusable services, including
- a unified notification service to send emails, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Jabber messages via a single API
- a conversion service to allow for pluggable file conversion (e.g. DOC -> HTML, PDF -> HTML, etc)
- a file repository service for storing large (>10 million) number of files, with pluggable strategies for distributing the files
- an XML-based validation framework which also does form generation
Added WebDAV hooks to the product to interface with WebDAV clients, e.g. Windows Explorer
Test coverage of my non-web-related code was >80%.

Projects and Publications

Developed Basis, an open-source project providing commonly-required components such as user management, login/authentication, role-based access management/authorization and Hibernate support classes.

Developed AsTMa= -> XTM converter, using JavaCC and Topic Maps for Java.

Active participant in Jakarta Apache open-source projects, committer of Jakarta Apache Lucene Sandbox, initial author of Jakarta Commons Configuration's XMLConfiguration and Jakarta Lucene's MultiFieldQueryParser. Author and maintainer of Lucene Sandbox's Javascript query validator and query constructor which were mentioned in Lucene in Action. Contributed patches to various Apache projects like Commons Digester and Turbine.

Miscellany

I speak and write fluent English and Mandarin (Chinese), and am currently conversant in German.

I have excellent language and writing skills, represented Singapore at the 2002 WFDF Ultimate Frisbee Championships, have a black belt in Ki-Aikido and founded the Internet Club at National Junior College (Singapore).

My Myers-Brigg test result, taken on 29 Feb 2004 at http://www.humanmetrics.com is INFP (Introverted - 22% Intuitive-44% Feeling-11% Perceiving-22%)

Email:	kelvint at apache.org
URL:	http://www.supermind.org/
Skype:	superkelvint