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Sean Levy
Software Architect and Internet Professional
Postal: #230 3439 NE. Sandy Blvd Portland OR 97232
Email: snl@cluefactory.com
KeyID: 70CA0181
Fingerprint: 8A4D 0345 A535 EA93 D4B1 5295 90A4 0ACB 70CA 0181
Web: http://www.cluefactory.com/~snl
Work History
Aug 2004 - Present
Founder, The Clue Factory, Portland, OR
Free-lance consulting work on a variety of contracts, ranging from
work-for-hire to long-range projects. I focus in the area of
robust, secure, high-performance web applications, but also work
in the areas of security, design/architecture and integrated
development of complete products. I also spend a significant
amount of my time working on open-source software projects,
including collaboration tools, a web application framework, and a
variety of analysis and visualization tools. One of my contracts
involves sustained managerial and project management activities,
including the formation and operation of a distributed team of
developers and designers.
June 2001 - July 2004
Member of Technical Staff, CERT/CC, Pittsburgh, PA
I now work at CERT, a part of the Software Engineering Institute at
Carnegie Mellon University. CERT is a center of Internet security
expertise that studies computer security vulnerabilities, handles
incidents, and publishes a widely read list of advisories and notes on
and related to computer security and the Internet. My duties as an
Internet Security Analyst include architecture, analysis, design and
implementation on a number of software projects.
March 2000 - April 2001
Vice President of Engineering, Halosoft Inc., Pittsburgh, PA
First employee of a startup founded by Levent Gursoz and funded by
Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Played integral role in acquiring
funding, forming technical team, and leading efforts aimed at
benchmarking and improving the scalability and performance of
leading-edge virtual machine technology. Participated at all levels,
including architecture, design and implementation.
September 1997 - Present
Member/Founder, St.Alphonsos, LLC, Pittsburgh, PA
Provide technical co-location services on a cost-recovery basis to
several Pittsburgh-area groups and small companies. St.Alphonsos
maintains it's own routable Class C IP address block and provides
DNS, email, web hosting and shell access to select people and
groups, over a T1 from Cable and Wireless.
Participate in consulting and software development on a variety
of St.Alphonsos projects, including Linux-based `toaster' embedded
applications, a scalable, persistent object store, tools and
technologies for building Web- and Agent-based systems, and
extensible, Agent-based computer security applications.
Sept 1998 - August 1999
Research Programmer, Parallel Data Lab, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA
Programming and research in the area of network-attached storage and
other research areas of interest to the Parallel Data Lab, a research
group within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
University. One of five research programmers in a group of approx. 25
faculty, graduate students and staff. Kernel-level and user-level
development and design, research into multiple aspects of
network-enabled storage systems and computational support for very
large data sets, work on publications, and interaction with funders
and colleagues via various forums.
Sept 1996 - Jan 1998
Senior Member of Technical Staff, Lycos, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA
System Programming Team Lead, responsible for reporting system for
Lycos Web service, benchmarking, troubleshooting, and general software
development projects in the Operations Group. Managed a team of four
people including self. Directed week-long benchmarking session at
Digital Equipment Corp.'s Greenbelt, MD benchmarking center.
1990 - Sept 1996
Senior Research Programmer, n-dim Group, EDRC, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA
System architect for n-dim, an information-modeling tool and support
system for collaboration. Design and implementation of all facets of
the system and co-authorship of publications as a part of a team of 6
developers (4 graduate students, 2 staff) and multiple
faculty/researchers.
System included a portable, prototype-based, object-oriented
environment (BOS), with associated object-oriented programming
language (stitch), interfaces to relational database management
systems and user-interface toolkits.
1988 - 1990
Research Programmer, EDRC, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA
Project programming and facilities support. Duties included
maintenance of the Distributed Problem Solving Kernel (DPSK), X
programming, Common Lisp programming, general UNIX systems programming
and support, and hardware and software facilities support and liaison
with CMU CS department.
Project work included expert systems development using KEE on Sun 3
and Symbolics LISP Machines, communications and user interface
software for concurrent engineering design environments developed at
EDRC, a Motif-based DAG visualization toolkit and applications, and
various projects involving integration of multiple programming
languages and representations (Scheme/C, LISP/Fortran, etc.).
1985 - 1987
Partner/Founder, Benway Computer Systems, San Diego, CA
Architected and built 4gl-type infrastructure and used it to
create vertical-market software for the auto body shop industry.
1982 - 1985
Systems Programmer, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA
Responsible for campus computing facilities software, including
networking, e-mail, account management and other ad-hoc development
efforts. VAX/VMS, Ultrix-11, AT&T SystemV, CP/M, DOS and other
now-ancient environments.
Computer Knowledge and Experience
Platforms
Most varieties of Unix (Linux, {Open,Free,Net}BSD, Tru64, Solaris, HP-UX,
IRIX, Mach, NeXTSTEP, etc.)
Intel/DOS-based computers, including low-level assembly language
programming
Many other operating systems and environments past (Symbolics, VMS,
TOPS-10, TOPS-20, several PDP-11-based systems, etc.)
Languages and Environments
C, Perl, LISP, LISP (several varieties), and many others past.
yacc, lex, awk, csh, sh, SQL, etc.
Have designed and implemented several languages and environments.
Specific Areas of Expertise and Interest
Web Applications: Design, architecture, n-tiered architecture.
Computer Security: Incident Detection, Analysis, Prevention
Distributed Systems: RPC, Group communications
Databases and Storage Systems: Relational Databases,
Persistent Object Stores, Legacy Data
The Internet and underlying/related technologies such as TCP/IP,
cryptography and p2p.
Object-orientation: Languages, Environments, Design and Implementation
Ongoing Work
WebApp: A secure, robust, high-performance web application framework
written from scratch in Perl, and released under an open-source
license (BSD).
Wookie: a Wiki written using the WebApp framework, which also
represents a slightly different angle on the whole Wiki concept;
you can see Wookie at https://wookie.cluefactory.com
Cost-Recovery Technical ISP: St.Alphonsos is a small, technical ISP that
I helped found in 1997 which exists mainly to provide bandwidth and
infrastructure for myself and a few other participants. It is not a
money-making operation, and provides limited collocation facilities to
several small local groups of technical people at cost. We use the term
"technical ISP" to mean an entity that provides ISP services to
technically competent people at low cost with essentially no support
other than the bare minimum of physical access when things go wrong.
The purpose of St.Alphonsos is not to make money, but simply to have
enough of a base that all participants have un-metered access to a T1 on
a cost-recovery basis. St.Alphonsos is based on OpenBSD and other
high-security, high-quality software packages available from the
Internet
Selected Publications and Technical Reports
Allen Dutoit, Sean Levy, Douglas Cunningham, Robert Patrick The
Basic Object System: Supporting a Spectrum from Prototypes To
Hardened Code, Proceedings of the Conference on
Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications
(OOPSLA), ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 31, 10,pp. 104-121, ACM Press,
October 6-10 1996.
Yoram Reich, Suresh Konda, Ira Monarch, Sean Levy, Eswaran
Subrahmanian Varieties and issues of participation and design,
Design Studies No 17(1996), pp 165-180
Birgitte Krogh, Sean Levy, Allen Dutoit, Eswaran Subrahmanian
Strictly class-based modeling considered harmful, in Proceedings of
HICSS-29: 29th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science
J.F. Nunmaker, Jr. and R.H. Sprague, Jr. (eds), IEEE Computer
Society Press (1995), Vol 2, pp 242-250
Sean Levy, Eswaran Subrahmanian, Suresh Konda, Robert Coyne, Art
Westerberg, Yoram Reich An Overview of the n-dim Environment,
Technical Report EDRC-05-65-93, Engineering Design Research Center,
Carnegie Mellon University (1993)
Eswaran Subrahmanian, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Ira Monarch, Yoram
Reich, Art Westerberg Computational support for shared memory in
design, in Automation-based creative design: current issues in
computers and architecture A Tzonis and I White(eds) Elsevier
Science Publishers (1993)
Eswaran Subrahmanian, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Yoram Reich, Art
Westerberg, Ira Monarch Equations aren't enough: informal modeling
in design, Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design, Analysis
and Manufacturing Vol 7 No 4 (1993) pp 257-274
Eswaran Subrahmanian, Robert Coyne, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Richard
Martin, Ira Monarch, Yoram Reich, Art Westerberg Support system for
different-time different-place collaboration for concurrent
engineering, in Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Enabling
Technologies Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE),
IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (1993), pp 187-191
Ira Monarch, Suresh Konda, Sean Levy, Yoram Reich, Eswaran
Subrahmanian, Carol Ulrich Shared memory in design: theory and
practice, in Proceedings of the Invitational Workshop on Social
Science Research, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work (Paris,
France), Départment Sciences Humaines et Sociales, CNRS, Paris,
France (1993) pp 227-241
References available upon request.