Personal details
Mark de Does
Magdalenastraat 6
3512 NH Utrecht
born January 3, 1956
phone +31 30 2314150
email mark@mdedoes.xs4all.nl
 
Profile
Mark is an experienced software architect that always tries to find the simplest possible solution. His current focus is on Java/JEE and internet technology. He has not forgotten his long experience in C/C++ development for Unix and Linux however. His long experience helps Mark to easily pick up new subjects and technologies. He is a goal oriented doer that nows to focus on the essentials without completely ignoring the details. As an enthusiast with a hands-on attitude, Mark is a better coach than he is a manager.
Mark is a member of the following professional associations: NLJUG (Dutch Java User Group), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), IEEE Computer Society.
 
Overview of technical knowledge and experience
 
 
Subject
Level
Years
Software product Design
Senior
15
Build Systems and Software packaging
Ant, Maven2, Make, deb, rpm, msi, unix PKG, HP swinstall
Senior
15
Ant: 6
Maven: 1
Quality Control and Test Suites
JUnit, Regression test suites, Scripting VMware VIX to run them, Fitnesse
Senior
15
Junit: 5
GUI Programming
Swing, AWT, GTK, Motif, NextStep
Senior
15
Document Formats
RTF, PDF, PostScript, XML based
Senior/Expert
15
Linux, Unix
Senior/Expert
25+
Windows
Medior
10
Java
Senior/Expert
10
C/C++
Unix cc,gcc,MS-C,from K&R via iso/ANSI 9898-1990 to full C++
Senior/Expert
25+
HTML/CSS
Senior
10
HTML5/W3C Widgets
Medior
1
Javascript/jQuery
Senior
5
Scripting
sh, bash, perl, vbscript
Senior/Expert
15
SQL
Senior/Expert
15
Relational Databases (general experience)
Senior
15
Oracle
Senior
10
MS-SQL/Sybase
Medior
8
MySql
Senior
5
Various other databases
RDB, Solid, DB2, Informix, HP-Neoview, NCR Teradata, C-Isam, PussyCat/Berkeley DB, Postgres
Senior
10
Java IDE's
Eclipse, RSA, Oracle J-Developer
Senior
8
Eclipse: 8
Source Code Control Systems
CVS, Rational ClearCase, Subversion
Senior
15
Network Protocols
Mainly HTTP, raw socket programming and some SMTP
Senior/Expert
15
HTTP/HTTPS: 10
J2EE Application Servers
JBoss, WebSphere AS, Tomcat, OC4J
Senior
5
Websphere AS: 2
JBoss: 2
JEE Integration technologies
Spring Framework
Senior/Expert
5
Java Object Relational Mapping
IBatis/myBatis, Hibernate, JPA, Spring JDBC-Template, HP ObjectServer
Senior
6
IBatis: 2
Hibernate: 2
ObjectServer: 4
J2EE Front End Technologies
Plain JSP, Spring MVC, JSF
Senior
4
JSF: 1 1/5 year
Web Services
Spring WS, Axis2, JAX-RS(Jersey), XML-RPC
Senior
3
Java Messaging
IBM WebSphere MQ, JBoss-MQ, JBoss Messaging, Active MQ
Senior
3
WS-MQ: 1 1/2
JBoss * 1 1/2
 
2009 - now -- Software Architect with TriOpSys
Software Architect / Consultant with TriOpSys. TriOpSys is a medium sized systems integrator with a focus on mission critical systems and mobile solutions. Besides that, TriOpSys is a specialist in traffic management systems.
September 2011 - now -- Application Engineer (Software architect) KAD at RABOBANK
The Customer Authorization Service (KAD) will be the system that is responsible for all customer authorizations for self-service applications at RABOBANK. The system is based on the customer and product data in Siebel and the administration of personal bank passes. The expected rapid growth of the use of self service applications over the internet requires high performance and high scalability.
I am working on the technical software architecture of the application and on the design of a general authorization API for all RABO internet applications. I actively participate in the implementation team as a senior member and a coach.
Technologies: Java, Spring framework 3, JAX-RS (Jersey), WebSphere Application Server, myBatis, DB2.
March 2011 - now -- Application Engineer (Software Architect) CIV at RABOBANK
The Customer Information View (CIV) is a web application embedded in an IFRAME in the Siebel console. In this way CIV supplements the Siebel CRM system of RABO bank. The application gives customer and account information to all customer facing staff at the local banks and at all call centers.
I have been reinvolved in the CIV project because changes in technology and in the positioning of the application required a partial redesign of the architecture. As such I am involved in the design of data services based on CIVs database and in the migration of the 200GB database from HP-NeoView to DB2 on Z/OS. The design of the data services focuses on their usability for the external applications and finding the right granularity in the balance between system load and network latency.
Technologies: XSD, Java, Spring Framework 2.5, WebSphere Application Server, myBatis, DB2, iBatis.
November 2010 - September 2011 -- Software Architect KNMI Climate Information System
TriOpSys reimplemented the Climate Information System of the Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute. (KNMI) The new system has a uniform architecture and is more robust than the original system. The focus was on future extensibility and on making the data available to researchers, public relations and even to the general public.
The system stores all weather and climate observations from 1850 until now. The data is exposed through a web based system for ad hoc queries. The result of the queries can be downloaded in CSV format or formatted in a wide variety of different formats including publication ready graphs and diagrams.
I participated in the general design of the system and implemented the data layer that is at the basis of the system. Throughout the project I have coached the development team with architectural and technical advice.
Technologies: Oracle, Spring Framework 3, Spring MVC rest support, JSON, jQuery, Apache Tomcat, JFeeChart, Linux, PostScript/PDF, Spring JDBC template.
November 2010 - July 2011 -- Software Architect Prikroute
TriOpSys built a mobile application for a Health Care laboratory. Nurses take blood samples at the patients home and take the samples to the laboratory. Every day, requests for examinations are collected, planned and then sent to the nurses PDA. The progress of the nurses during the day is monitored and the results are reported at the end of the day.
The application consists of several components: (1) Receiving orders over HL7. (2) Automatically planning the orders based on geographic information. (3) Sharing the information with the PDA. (4) Reporting. Because of the limitations of Windows Mobile, the PDA client is a .Net application. Special attention was paid to the reliability and the statelessness of the communication between the PDA and the application server. For the user interface of the back office, we reused the iMOS planboard.
I made the general design and the technology decisions. I also designed the (JSON based) communication protocol and implemented the server side.
Technologies: Spring Framework 3, myBatis, JBoss, HAPI HL7 Library, .Net, MS-SQL.
April 2009 - November 2010 -- Software architect iMOS
Software architect for TriOpSys iMOS field service application product. iMOS is a mobile application that supports the field service process. It consists of modules for planning, logistics and progress reporting. On top of the base functionality, TriOpSys develops and delivers custom modules for its customers.
iMOS is a traditional J2EE application that runs in JBoss. It uses Hibernate as its database interface. The mobile front end runs as a Java application on PDAs. It stays in touch with the server via messaging. The obvious implementation as a web application was unsuitable when the application was incepted as field engineers work in places where connectivity might be absent or too unreliable.
After more than 5 years, we realize that there have been important technical developments since iMOS inception. The traditional j2EE reference architecture is not ideal for a mobile application and new and simpler technologies for internet applications and for communication now exist. These include internet applications that can temporarily store data locally while no internet communication is possible. My task was to gradually modernize and optimize the iMOS application architecture without completely overhauling it.
A non negligible part of the energy went into the task of convincing the organization that change was necessary if we want the product to survive.
We managed to base several stable customer projects on the improved software.
Technologies: JBoss, Hibernate, JBoss MQ, HTTP, CreMe JVM, Windows Mobile, MySQL, Oracle, MS-SQL.
January 2009 - April 2009 -- Calculator for Travel Expenses
Design and implementation of a tool to manage and calculate travel expenses. The relatively small size of the project, combined with the fact that it is publicly available over the internet made it an ideal candidate for a jQuery/AJAX based rich internet application without any server side involvement with the user interface.
Technologies: IIS, Apache web server, YAJL JSON parser, jQuery, MS-C
May 2007 - December 2008 -- Software Architect with Ordina J-Technologies.
September 2007 - December 2008 -- Software Architect CIV at RABOBANK
CIV is customer/product information system that supplements the Siebel CRM system of RABO bank. The application gives customer and account information to all customer facing staff at the local banks and at all call centers. It is embedded in an iFrame in the Siebel user console.
The integration with Siebel on one side, and various legacy database structures on the other side were a challenge. Additionally, for reasons outside the scope of the project design, we had to use a HP NeoView database server that required extensive tuning, both in the structure of the database schema and in the database engine configuration before it could deliver acceptable performance. (Upto 100 queries/second)
In practice, as a software architect, I took the responsibility to technically coach the developers.
The high number of external interfaces and the evolving specifications forced us into a very modular component based architecture based on the Spring framework.
As requirements were not completely clear at the beginning of the project, we have used an incremental approach to development. This was the best way to get commitment in the organization even though it was completely agains corporate culture.
The application is deployed in two IBM WebSphere clusters at two different locations. Additional communication between the application server and the Siebel server is through IBM MQ services. Since end 2008, the system is in production with upto 22,000 concurrent users, serving 1,000,000 screens per day.
Technologies: JSF, Spring Framework 2.5, Oracle, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, HP-NeoView
June 2007 - August 2007 -- Implementing iDEAL at Europeesche Verzekeringen
Implemented iDEAL payments on the web site of a travel insurance company. This is a proof of concept implementation that actually went into production.
Technologies: Plain JSP, EJB, WebSphere Application server, XML-RPC, Prototype JS (too much of it)
May 2007 -- Legacy system for Transportation Company
I participated in the reimplementation of a legacy FOXPRO application with Spring MVC. A major part was fixing the reporting module that was built with BIRT.
Technologies: Spring Framework 2, BIRT, iText.
May 2002 - May 2007 -- Senior developer and Team Lead HP OpenView
Senior developer and Team Lead of the Service Desk Team at HP-OpenView in Amsterdam. Service Desk is a Java application that implements the ITIL service management standard. My position was partly in design, partly in implementation. Many of the activities relate to making the product more mature:
•
I designed and built an automatic regression test framework to monitor the quality of the software. Though the technology is based on the junit unit test framework, most of the tests are functional regression tests. The framework fully automatically installs the packages that come from the latest build, then creates a database and runs the tests.
•
I created tools to measure the performance of the product and on the basis of the results I introduced several performance improvements. The performance measurement tool and the load generator record actual user sessions at the interface between client and server in the form of a Java program. The generated program replays the session with small variations to load the system and to measure response times.
•
Service Desk is built on top of a very complex object-relational database model. After six month of convincing my colleagues and management I managed to bring the model under source code version control. This is an absolute necessity as several teams work on components that are integrated into Service Desk.
•
I am the designer of the Service Desk installation and upgrade procedure. It is a major challenge to implement a complex database schema like the Service Desk schema at the customer site. It is even harder to check and upgrade the schema at a customer site when the software is upgraded.
•
I was the architect of the ServiceDesk/Database interface: A home brewn object relational mapping mechanism. Though standard technology might have been preferable, it was quite successful in separating the details of the database schema and the application implementation.
March 2000 - May 2002 -- Founding Member W3Creative.com
March 2000 - May 2002 -- Member of the technical team
W3Creative.com is the author of the 'Game of the Worlds' internet game that can be found at the URL www.simcountry.com. It is a virtual world consisting of oceans, continents regions and countries. The players are the presidents of the countries. They decide on the budget, education, social policy and economic issues or they just work on trade contracts for their countries. Behind the scenes is a realistic economic world model that runs at the pace of three month in one day on Linux servers. I contributed to the general architecture of the application and the implementation of the model. I designed and made the software that builds the world- and country maps and adapts them to the current state of the countries. I designed and built the database interface of the model and most of the processes that run the model on just une Linux server. It was quite a challenge to optimize the economic model process that fully updates a 200000 record database several times a day.
1984 - March 2000 -- Chief Engineer with SuperNova Technology
1984 - March 2000 -- Chief Engineer
SuperNova Technology started as a software house specialized in UNIX. It now produces the software tools like SuperNova Application Developer, SuperNova Decision Query and SuperNova Visual Concepts. Since I left SuperNova the company has been acquired by WRQ inc. and the tool set was renamed to WRQ VeraStream.
As chief engineer and architect directly reporting to the CEO, I am one of the principal designers of the SuperNova software tools that include:
·
SuperNova Application Developer is an object based 4GL and graphical application builder.
·
SuperNova Decision Query is a report generator in which the user can build a template report, and let the generator derive the query strategy from the report.
·
SuperNova Visual Concepts, a component assembly tool for the construction of component based applications from standard application components.
 
I contributed a major part to the architecture and the implementation of the tool set. (Mostly in C.) My contributions to the architecture and implementation include:
·
The abstraction layer between the products and database engines or record managers. It offers simultaneous access to different database systems through a uniform interface.
·
The core SuperNova engine. It is an object based engine that executes the business logic in an application system.
·
The distributed processing part of SuperNova: It can move over part of an application to another node on a computer network and execute that part over there.
·
The interface of SuperNova products to GUI systems such as MS-Windows and Motif. This includes a wide variety of graphical objects and an interface for call-backs to the SuperNova core engine.
·
The Query By Report algorithm of SuperNova Decision Query.
·
A fully validating XML parser and XML DTD browser and a message composer for the SuperNova application construction and integration environment.
1983 - 1984 -- Statistician, Programmer with RIVM
I wrote programs for statistical analysis and data management of the epidemiology department of the National Institute for Public Health in C. An important part of the work was statistical consultancy.
1975 - 1983 -- Student in Mathematical Biology
Statistical analysis programs and simulation programs, mostly in a biological context. At university I worked on graph rewriting systems and formal languages. I built a generator and an inference engine for Map L systems, producing graphical output.
2000 - 2011 -- Technical achievements outside the context of a job
I am the author of a set of spelling servers originally for the NextStep environment. It is a set of production quality spelling checkers. Its main interest lies in the application of finite automata for approximate search.
I am the author of the Ted RTF text formatter. As one of the more complete and fastest open source text formatters Ted is widely used to produce appealing PDF output from application software. I have done several projects where I have extended the Ted text formatter to support more RTF features and to integrate it with database applications. In particular for two Italian service providers to local banks that use the Ted text formatter to produce contracts and policies and the German Railway company that uses it to format some of their timetables. I am a specialist in various document formats and their conversion. In particular in RTF, PostScript, PDF and HTML.
I am the author of an easy lightweight wysiwyg rich text processor for Unix/Linux and GTK (or Motif). It is based on the Ted text formatter. Though it runs on any POSIX implementation it is a Linux application in practice. It is available from http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted. It implements most of the RTF 1.5 standard. Besides that it is an experiment into the limitations of one single individual when he has to implement a full software product. Evidently Ted uses the spell checkers mentioned above.
For pleiade management and consultancy I built a framework for conducting surveys over the internet: www.pleiadesurvey.nl Once installed, it allows a surveyor such as a market researcher to conduct a survey without the help of a technician. For pragmatic reasons the system was implemented in perl. The whole application runs on the server of an internet ISP. The survey questionnaires are defined as an MS-Excel spreadsheet and uploaded to the server. The survey is conducted over the internet and the reporting module produces complete fully formatted statistical reports with publication quality tables, statistic tests and bar charts in Microsoft Word format.