2023-now Independent College - Part-time Lecturer
- Lecture to students taking the IT Pathway for the BA in Business Studies
- Set and mark assessments
2017-2023 IBM, IBM Dublin Software Lab - Watson Technical Lead
- In 2017 joined the Data & AI Expert Labs team. My job title is technical specialist and my role is to work with customers to help them make best use of the Watson family of AI services.
- Worked on many of the IBM AI services: mainly Watson Assistant, Watson Discovery and Watson Studio. In addition, was the technology lead for Europe for speech technologies. Was involved in a number of projects to build customized speech to text models.
- Also worked on some projects to develop prediction models in SPSS.
- Sometimes my task was to deliver technical enablement sessions, but more commonly I joined a customer’s team helping them develop a solution to their needs. Most of coding is in nodeJS and Python languages.
2014-2017 IBM, IBM Dublin Software Lab - SmartCloud Notes Monitoring and Resilience
- In 2014 joined the SmartCloud Notes team. This team provided a cloud hosted email service for several large companies. The email files were stored on Lotus Notes/Domino server, but several other server types were also used. The team practised modern agile techniques, such as using CHEF to automate deployment and a gatekeeper service to progressively enable newly deployed features.
- Main responsibility was the development of a number of probes which pushed data to services like NewRelic and LogEntries so that we could get an overview of how the service is performing. It also had the ability to trigger PagerDuty alerts whenever adverse conditions were detected.
- Spent a considerable amount of my time working on a new implementation of the IMAP protocol which allowed us to provide instantaneous fail-over of service whenever a failure was encountered (either a single server or an entire data centre).
- Coding was in C, C++, Java and Ruby
- In 2012 took up a position leading a series of small team transforming innovative ideas from research into concrete prototypes which can were trialled with early adopters of our Smarter Planet solutions. Solutions included automated sentiment analysis and detection of traffic problems from tweets
2011-2012 IBM, IBM Dublin Software Lab - Sametime Consumability Specialist
- In 2011 I changed from Management to an individual contributor role. I was responsible for simplifying the installation and deployment of the Sametime family of products. This involves identifying the most common problems that customers have when deploying Sametime products and then driving changes in the products to eliminate these problems.
- In 2001 the group with which I worked was merged into IBM and its mission changed from Localization/internationalization to core development. However, we continued to work predominately on products which were sold under the Lotus brand name.
- Had a number of software development teams reporting into me. Had overall responsibility for the management of the teams and the delivery of the various products/components assigned to us. As well as managing direct contributors I would also have responsibility for managing other managers.
- Start in January 2001, was responsible for the Dictionaries and Linguistics Tools Team (also known as Languageware). This was a worldwide team developing roughly 30 different language dictionaries and associated tools used by IBM products for Natural Language Processing tasks (e.g. spell checking or morphological analysis).
- In 2003, also became Program Director for the newly launched IBM Dublin Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS). This centre runs a number of programs aimed at strengthening the linkages between the IBM Dublin Software Lab (DSL) and local academic researchers working in related fields. I continued in this role in parallel with my other responsibilities until 2008.
- At the start of 2004, became manager of the Dublin Tools Group. This group developed a number of different tools to help customers develop applications for the IBM/Lotus platform. We were responsible for developing the composite application programming model which allows line of business users to easily develop applications by wiring together components developed with different technologies (e.g. JSR168 portlets, Notes databases, eclipse plugins ).
- In August 2007 became responsible for the newly established Sametime development team in Dublin. Sametime is a suite of products providing realtime communication. This team is roughly one third of the global team developing the Sametime family of products for real-time collaboration. About half of the resources under my control are working on the Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) product and the other half are spread across a number of different parts of the Sametime portfolio. I have special responsibility for managing the interaction between the global Sametime development team and other product teams who incorporate Sametime functionality into their products.
1994-2001 Lotus Development, Airways Ind. Est., Cloghran, Dublin 17 - Various Job Titles
- Was hired by Lotus in June 1994 with a job title of Localisation Project Manager.I managed a group of engineers working on the localisation of software applications. The products I worked on included 1-2-3,WordPro, SmartSuite and Notes. We localised these products into roughly 20 different languages. It was my responsibility to manage the group's schedules and priorities and well as overseeing the development of the processes and tools used.
- In 1995 the Lotus company was bought by IBM, but it continued to operate as am independent subsidiary.
- In 1996 was promoted to Development Manager, where I continued to work on Localisation but my level of responsibility/accountability was increased to include total control of budgets and people management.
- In January 2000 was promoted to the grade of Senior Development Manager. This meant that I was a second line manager with other managers reporting into me. I was given responsibility for developing national language support in Lotus Notes and Domino (i.e. ensuring that the product was capable of working various locales and dealing with text in a variety of languages). The most challenging aspect of this was developing support for BiDirectional languages (e.g. Arabic or Hebrew) where the text is written from right to left, while embedded numbers or segments of text in other languages such as English or French are written from left to right.
This employment consisted of three different jobs :
April 1991 - June 1994 Senior Software Development Engineer
- Designed and developed a system for managing the installation and licensing of software products in a network of heterogeneous computers. This system had the following features:
- It had a MOTIF graphical interface
- It used a relational database
- It had a client server architecture
- It worked on many different platforms (VMS, UNIX and PC)
- It comprised of over 80,000 lines of C code.
- Managed software projects which involved up to 10 other engineers.
- Led a team which implemented improvements in our software development process.
- Developed and implemented CDROM pre-mastering software.
- Advised plant staff about opportunities arising from distributing software on CDROM.
- Set-up a process for publishing software on CDROM (which was significantly different from the process used with traditional media types).
- Initiated a feasibility study on setting up a CDROM manufacturing operation.
- Managed a group of three persons.
- Was responsible for the quality of all flexible diskettes and tapes purchased by Digital in Europe.
- Worked with vendors to develop production capabilities for new types of tapes and diskettes.
- Implemented a quality improvement program in the tape replication process which allowed the company to eliminate 100% verification of all tapes.
This job was for a manufacturer of flexible diskettes. My duties included :
- Analysed customer returns to determine the cause of failure.
- Designed tests and test equipment which ensured that the product met the customers requirements.
- Co-ordinated the adaptation of the production process to handle new diskette types.
- Trained customers about the correct use and testing of diskettes.
